


The Meridian Word

by Ohtze, Trebia



Series: Meridian Verse [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Horror, Drama, F/M, Heavy Angst, Here be the bones of your happiness, Horror, Other, Psychological Drama, Psychological Horror, Shakarian - Freeform, Shep is a tiny tank of terror, Tragedy, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-01 15:37:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 41,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10193165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ohtze/pseuds/Ohtze, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trebia/pseuds/Trebia
Summary: Death is only a door, they tell him, and doors can be opened. Beyond the shadows of his Dark Place—wrapped in the wires of an Elder God—his Lovely Corpse rises, bodies strewn like wilted flowers across the Presidium gardens. Worlds die beneath the weight of their collective fury and transcendence is a gift. Lore-compliant, but definitely in-canon AU.





	1. Agent Provocateur

**Author's Note:**

> **A word of warning** : This story is a **hard M** , and with that rating there comes certain expectations that most readers should be familiar with (violence, mature themes, etc.). Suffice to say, things will be dark. This is the only time that we’ll mention it.
> 
> **Disclaimer** : This fanwork is intended for personal, non-commercial use only. All creative works off which this fanwork is based are the property of their respective authors. No copyright infringement is intended.

She showed up at the club with some bitch of a human whose white bodysuit dug into her crotch, her heels clicking with a sashaying rhythm that was all but drowned out by the thudding bass of Afterlife. The gun-toting pipsqueak marching beside her knew Aria by name. She looked a bit like a drowned varren and far too eager.

Her former associate seemed hungry, Aria decided. Maybe starved for attention, and a bit wild around the eyes. _Young_ eyes, they were, far too green and much too big. Aria forgot how old Shepard was, except that she knew that the Spectre was young by asari standards. Former Spectre, really. **Dead** Spectre, who was supposed to be floating through the blackness of space, all burnt skin and memories. Last time Aria had seen her, Shepard had been a corpse on a slab: a trophy for the Blue Suns to lord over.

 _Normandy_ had kicked it, everyone knew, and should have stayed kicked. What the fuck was the trigger-happy pjyak playing at? Had anyone checked Shepard for weapons? Aria could feel her blood pressure skyrocketing.

“Aria!” the human said, grinning wide and holding out her arms as if for a hug. She was wearing some sort of hooded, long-sleeved garment over pitch-black armor that was offset by crimson. The hood part was drawn up to hide her face and she wore no helmet. Aria saw the grenades either way, ringing her hips in a belt. The Spectre was carrying enough armaments to knock out a krogan, along with two top-of-the-line Harpy pistols slung into their magnetic holsters. Aria’s first thought upon seeing that Shepard was alive was one of general annoyance: Liara had conveniently forgotten to mention that her plan for the corpse was bringing it back from the dead. The second thought was _no one searched her._ _Fuck the Matriarchs,_ ** _no one searched the Spectre_** _._ For the first time in her very long life Aria almost spat up her drink. It still spilled down her jacket with the sudden jerk of her hand: an ugly compromise.

Blue, her beverage was, and somewhat fruity. It turned a pale purple under the neon pink strobe lights, the dark red cherry bobbing in time. Seventh Lagoon, the humans called it, and it was a product that she regretted ordering. There were crates of it sitting in cold storage beneath the floor of her club, rotting away for patrons that had yet to materialize.

Beside her one of the guards surreptitiously eyed the spilt drink. Aria clenched her fist in warning. One move. One fucking comment about that fruity shit all over her lovely white jacket and she would crush his windpipe with a flick of her wrist. With as much dignity as she could muster Aria reached up, wiping away the aqua fizz with a slender, pale purple finger. The bitch in the pearl-white bodysuit with the too-dark hair—the one accompanying Shepard—raised an eyebrow. _Biotic_ , Aria could tell. She could smell it on her from where she was sitting.

“Can I sit here?” Shepard chirped.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” Aria replied, returning her attention to the little monster. She was going to have words with Liara later. The human looked smaller than Aria remembered her. Maybe it was the being-dead part.

Shepard sniffled, a bit like a sand addict. She reached up, her ungloved hand nearly drowning in a too-long sleeve as she rubbed at the skin beneath her nose. There were dark circles around her eyes, like smudges of makeup on the cage dancers. Her fingers were mere toothpicks beneath the baggy cuff of her jacket, and far too pale for Aria’s liking. She liked her girls with color.

“Right,” Shepard said, nodding once. She was a little less cheerful this time. “Right, ‘bout that.” She wasn’t wearing her Spectre threads either, which was odd. Shepard had fought real hard for those and she’d killed for them too. She’d been super proud, strutting around for days like an idiot. Aria vividly remembered the encounter.

 _“I’m legit now,_ ” she’d said when it happened, slouched lazily against the edge of the bar. _“You should be proud of me.”_

 _“Still a gangster,”_ Aria had murmured over the lip of her shot glass. Shepard had drunkenly grinned and reached across the counter for some Noverian rum.

 _“A_ **_legitimate_ ** _gangster,”_ she’d slurred back, drink perched in hand. The human’s face had been as red as her hair. _“The legitimate-est. Praise me.”_

_“I’m not your fucking mother.”_

Across the table the woman in the bodysuit coughed in warning. Instantly Aria’s attention was back in the present and her ire grew. The human was wearing Cerberus colors: black, white and yellow like some sort of mutated hornet. Aria already couldn’t **stand** Cerberus, but she was hovering around Shepard all mother bird-ish, chrome-colored datapad impatiently clasped in her manicured hand. Pretending to nonchalantly raise her arm away from her lapel, Aria leisurely dipped her own in the air, limp-wristed and flopping backwards. Very subtly she waved an extra bouncer over. A krogan turned away from the dance floor and began making his way towards them, walking slow over the glowing red tiles. Shepard may not have been wearing her Spectre threads, but she still moved like one. The kid had always been small but punched like a brawler when you got too close. Aria respected that. _Had_ , at least. It was why she’d given Liara the location of Shepard’s body.

“Shepard,” the woman in white began, when Shepard started to speak. She had grey eyes and an aristocratic face that screamed _good breeding._ Shepard flinched in a manner that was highly suspicious. She frowned hard, taking a few steps to the side. Aria took note of that as well. _What had they done to her?_

“I didn’t ask you,” Aria cut in, turning to look at the human head-on. The woman met her gaze in turn. Shepard waved one too-pale hand, scoffing aloud and speaking with levity. It fooled no one.

“Oh, that’s Miranda,” she said.

Shepard wasn’t starved, Aria decided, but pretty close to it. Very rough around the edges and worn down worse than the bloody turian. Where the fuck had she been? Omega had been dealing with her loose cannon of a lieutenant ever since she’d supposedly jetted off to meet her Maker. The Goddess take her, but if the pipsqueak had come back from the dead and purposely left an unhinged turian on the station—fucking up drug shipments while she made nice with some bitch from Cerberus—she was going to **hear it**.

“Miranda worries,” Shep continued. “A lot. Best of the best, she is, Worrier of Worriers. Kasumi’s better.”

“Kasumi?”

“You’ll meet her soon.”

Shepard sat herself down without prompting, back hunched, legs splayed and hands clasped like she meant business. It would have been convincing if Aria hadn’t seen the fearful tilt to those shoulders curling inwards; if she hadn’t seen the way that Shepard’s bottle green eyes darted around the neon-lit room or how her bottom lip was cracked from gnawing on it. There was some messed-up scarring on her face that Aria couldn’t see too well under the glare of the pulsing bubblegum pillar and her navy blue hood, but it almost looked like they were glowing. Shepard sat as far away from Miranda as possible.

“Did I say you could sit?”

“ _Nope_ ,” answered Shepard, emphasizing the end of the word with a _pop_. She looked at Aria in a hopeful manner. _Thump, thump, bada-thump_ went the beat of the club, bodies moving like shadows on sunny walls across the suspended rim of Afterlife’s reactor. When Shepard continued to sit Aria pinched the bridge of her nose, counting backwards from ten. _Deep breathes,_ she reminded herself _._ She was almost certain she knew what the little monster was here for.

“What do you want?” she demanded. The answer was immediate.

“Garrus, please and thank you,” Shepard said, speaking loudly to be heard over an electronic snare beat that sounded a bit like a war drum. She shifted nervously in her seat and began picking at the skin around her nails as a wail joined the bass, metallic and undulating. The flesh there looked red and raw, but maybe it was just the lights. There were weird scars on the backs of her palms that matched her face. Some sort of implants, maybe? She smelt like biotics. On the dance floor bodies began moving faster, gyrating to the militaristic track. It was a new type of music from the human territories: her patrons loved it. “Also, the doctor. A salarian, Mordin Solus. Also –”

“I am not a fucking candy dispenser,” Aria spat.

“Fine,” Shepard said, much too quickly. Pink illumination flashed across her face, her ink-colored armor lighting-up rust red with the vermilion glow from the floor. She definitely looked desperate, and even held out her hands in surrender. Goddess she was a **mess**. “Just Garrus.”

Aria grimaced and waved another guard over: the music was too loud to shout the distance. A Spectre being twitchy in her club was not a good thing, but this Spectre was Shepard and the braindead bouncers hadn’t checked her for weapons. Later they’d pay for it. Liara was going to get a very terse omni-call once she was finished.

“Should have know,” Aria said, giving Shepard a _look_ . Shepard returned the look with another that made it clear the implication sailed straight over her head. Not good with subtlety, that one. Not good at dancing either. The whole club seemed to shake with the pulse of the music, the crowds writhing in waves as the pink reactor flashed. Human drinks didn’t sell, but human music **did**. Aria made a mental note of it.

“Of course,” Shepard agreed, shouting back her response. “We’re super close! Teammates. I’ll get the doctor later!”

Miranda visually groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose, mimicking Aria’s earlier movement.

“First we’re going to talk,” Aria said, slowly setting her drink on the table. The droning wail from the bass was reaching a fevered pitch. She waved her hand towards her personal server—an asari dressed in red—then to Shepard, offering her a shot. Shepard shook her head and waved her hand back, far too small and strung out like a junkie. Her face was younger than Aria remembered it. Even beneath the darkened rim of her hood and the pulsating lights, she could tell the stress lines around her eyes and mouth had vanished. The older scars were gone, too. The human was clasping her hands together as if to keep herself from reaching for her guns, which Aria appreciated, but it also meant that Shepard was _thinking_ of reaching for her guns, which made her nervous.

Very subtly—crossing her legs and draping her hand over her knee—Aria leaned back on the couch, laying her other arm over the top of it. She let her free hand hang in the air as she casually played with a bit of Eezo along her knuckles. Most of the biotic glow was lost to the pink effulgence of Afterlife, but she knew the Cerberus bitch saw it. Shepard saw it too, but did nothing.

 _Thump, thump, bada-thump_ went the song, it’s eerie ululation pulsing in time to industrial drums, and the crowds screamed in return, exultant. Aria’s drink on the table was vibrating with the singular movement of their bodies. There were too many people in the club.

The server straightened her back, her expression carefully neutral as her red dress banded with fuchsia from the flashing lights. She took a smooth step away from the direct line of fire, towards the exit. The guards stayed still, their hands on their assault rifles.

“Sure we can talk,” Shepard said, much more gamely than before. “Not long, though. I’ve got things to do. People to see.” She rubbed at the skin beneath her nose, her fingers trembling visibly. Her metal-clad foot was scraping anxiously against the humming, back-lit floor. Aria hated it. You couldn’t trust junkies and this one was armed.

Shepard’s eyes kept glancing around the club, then back to her. Briefly the asari wondered if she was searching for _him_ , but she knew she wouldn’t find Archangel in the Afterlife. He did his holier-than-thou reaping elsewhere.

“We’re going to talk as long as we need to talk,” Aria replied, raising her voice even louder. She had to make that point clear, or the pipsqueak would start steamrolling. She’d always been bad for that. “My station, my rules. Not yours.”

“Spectres don’t have rules!” Shepard parroted, leaning forward so Aria could hear her. She had a look in her eyes that said she didn’t believe the party line, but Aria’s answer was immediate. She pointed her index finger towards the ground, pressing it up and down to her black-clad knee for emphasis.

“My rules, Shepard, or you’re being kicked to the curb. Got it?”

Shepard laughed, and it was a high, strained thing, the meat of it lost to spectral shriek of the reverberating music that trailed off into a drone. She was getting twitchier by the second, her shakes timing with the heaviest _thuds_ from the bass. Even through the pulsating beat Aria could hear the human’s words clear as day. They sent a chill up her spine.

“The dead don’t have rules,” Shepard declared.

Aria finally knew why the woman’s eyes were bothering her so badly: the hue of them was much too bright and downright unnatural for a human. Eezo-enhanced, maybe. She stank of biotics worse than her Cerberus handler. “The dead don’t need rules,” Shepard continued. “You should have seen it, Aria. The other side. It’s super black, just nothingness –”

Aria ignored her. She turned to the woman in white, taking her hand off the couch to gesture lazily in Shepard’s direction.

“What is she on?” the asari demanded. It was at this point that Aria decided enough was enough. She waved another guard over, much less subtly than before. Immediately Shepard grew indignant. She sat up straight, her hands breaking from their clenched position.

“I’m not on anything!” she said. “I’m looking for Garrus –”

“It’s her implants,” Miranda cut in. Aria could tell the Cerberus bitch was deeply displeased that she had to say anything: that she was only speaking so they wouldn’t die from a gunshot to the back of the head. “She’s been disoriented since she woke up.”

“I’m fine,” Shepard said, springing to her feet. “I’m **fine**. There’s nothing wrong with me.” She was still short and way too thin, but beneath the armor Aria could tell she was built like a tank, all wiry and compacted like a sleek Kassa rifle. Her eyes were beginning to glow blue, and so were her fingers. One of her hands was reaching for the yellow-plated Harpy on her hip.

Aria pretended to ignore the blatant threat, but the guards didn’t. They sprung into action, shotguns at the ready. Shepard’s lips pulled back in a snarl, and Miranda quickly raised her hands in surrender.

“She doesn’t mean it,” the Cerberus woman said, her words sharp and forceful. “We’ll leave.”

“Of course I meant it!” Shepard snapped. She was ignoring the guards and their guns like they were nothing more than smears of paint on the wall. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here!” The beat of the music got louder.

“Drop your weapons!” one of the guards shouted. It was a batarian nicknamed _Clutch_.

“You have a lot of nerve,” Aria told the Cerberus woman, bracing her hands against the back of her couch as she pushed herself forward. She was **really** angry now. “Walking in here with those colors, bringing _her_ here, all strung out.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Miranda said, her hands still raised. Her face was a mask.

“I said stop talking about me like I’m not here!” Shepard insisted. One of her hands was on one of her pistols. “I’m looking for Garrus!”

“Bitch, you **left** him on my station,” Aria snapped, finally turning to the Spectre. She didn’t stand up. She made no sudden moves around Spectres unless she was planning to kill them, and at the moment she was simply imagining ripping off Shepard’s arms instead. “Do **not** get on my case because you forget to take out your trash.”

“We’ll go,” Miranda repeated as the guards advanced, taking a smooth step backwards.

Aria sneered in a nasty way, unfolding her long legs as her heels clicked primly against the tiles. “You’ll go into mine shafts at the bottom of Omega,” she agreed. Then she stood. “I’ll put you there myself.”

Over by the wall, a shadow materialized out of thin air with the crackle of a stealth cloak: a woman in black with a glowing omni-blade on her hand, bubblegum bars of bright pink light flashing across the sleek carbon of her bodysuit.

The server officially made a beeline for the exit. More enforcers moved down from the dance floor. The crowds roared, unconcerned.

“Kasumi, I presume,” Aria said, turning to the shadow woman. “You’ll go down with her.”

“Kasumi, back off,” Miranda warned. Shepard didn’t.

“I said stop talking like I’m not here!” she declared, shouting to be heard over the _thrum_ of the club. “I’m looking for Garrus!”

Aria whirled on her. “One more word out of you and I’ll put you down there with them!”

It all happened in less than a second. One moment they were speaking: the next a guard was raising his weapon at Shepard. Shepard raised hers faster, pistol in hand so quick Aria could barely follow the movement. Her stance was straight and position perfect as three shots rang out.

There was the splatter of warm red blood speckling across Aria’s cheek; the body of the batarian hitting the ground with a wet, uneven splatter. Another shot rang out. A second guard fell. There were screams in the club echoing in time to the music.

The woman with the omni-blade slit the throat of a nearby bouncer. A krogan named Nuzk reached for Shepard, intending to bludgeon her. The long-dead human—all one-hundred and twenty-two pounds, over three feet shorter—took a burning blue fist and rammed it straight through the mercenary’s armor, past muscle and bone as she searched for an organ. The krogan bellowed in pain and hit the ground hard. Shepard grabbed onto something beneath his ribs, crushing it in a surge of cobalt. Aria cursed.

Her hand still in his chest, the Spectre put her gun to the krogan’s head and pulled the trigger, shooting him point blank with an even blanker expression. Nuzk hit the tiles with a _thud_.

“Shepard!” the woman in white cried out, stepping towards her. Aria stepped towards her too, blue building around her hands. The second she did Shepard turned her gun on her, fingers stained with bits of pink, unidentifiable organs. Calm and steady she was, her expression dead and somewhat robotic. A weird pattern of scarring lit up across the right side of her face like a grid. Her eyes were glowing red, too.

The Spectre didn’t pull the trigger, but she had a kill shot. The only thing that betrayed any emotion was her voice.

“I’m here for Garrus,” she said, her bottom lip quivering. Her voice wavered slightly. “Just Garrus. That’s all I want.”

Fuck the Matriarchs, the two of them were too much. No wonder they’d worked so well as a team.

Aria didn’t say anything. She **did** hold out her hand, palm up, and after a moment’s hesitation Shepard handed her gun to her, butt first. Aria took it in silence, holstering it on her hip. Like all of Shepard’s armaments the Harpy was designed for overkill and modded up to the eyeballs. If she’d pulled the trigger Aria’s head would have exploded.

“Shepard,” Miranda began, stepping forward. She reached out, her black heels clacking against the floor. Kasumi stayed where she was. Aria turned around.

Before anything else could happen, the asari clocked Shepard straight across the nose with an Eezo-laced fist.

There was the _crack_ of bone; the sight of a small figure stumbling unevenly, her head whipping sideways and hand going to her face as her nose exploded with red. Once she regained her balance Shepard stood there, blinking owlishly, her blood looking black under the low pulsing lights. It dripped in a steady rhythm onto the floor.

The hit should have broken her nose but it hadn’t. The crack of bone had been from _Aria’s_ knuckles. The asari swayed a bit, biting down on the inside of her cheek to keep herself from gasping in pain. Shepard’s face felt like it was made of metal.

“We done here, or do I have to kill you?” she grit out.

“ _Ow_ ,” the Spectre said through a mouthful of blood. Cursing colorfully in asari, Aria stepped over the body of the batarian. She grabbed the server’s discarded towel with her good hand before making her way back to Shepard, shoving it in the human’s face. Her discarded drink was vibrating on the table with the _thud, thud, thud_ of feet and drums. Hands rose from the throng of people on the dancefloor, bodies gyrating in waves.

“No more bleeding on the floors,” Aria spat.

Thin, scarred hands grabbed at the cloth, glowing eyes blinking erratically beneath the rim of a navy hood.

“Roger, Roger.” It was a human expression.

“My office, now.”

Aria turned away from the dance floor, walking towards a set of stairs that led deeper into Afterlife. Shepard followed. Miranda did too, informing “Kasumi” to head back to the ship _._

“NOT YOU!” Aria roared, thoroughly done for the day. She snapped her fingers at the guard, pointing to the Cerberus bitch and the stealth-cloaked assassin standing near the now-ruined couch. “Get them out of my club,” she said. Then she pointed to two more bouncers, gesturing to the bodies on the ground. “You, clean this up.”

Turning back, Aria stalked off. The rest of the guards and Shepard followed without incident.

* * *

 

Aria had first met Shepard when she was six. Nimble, she was, and _tiny,_ with the smallest feet and hands Aria had ever laid eyes on. The kid had been recruited as a drug runner for the Reds during their early days on the galactic black market. Shepard had never been off-planet before before that point, but she was a real quick study. Really friendly, too. They’d been on some godawful freighter, lurking just past the turian blockades left over from Shanxi. Aria almost never ventured outside the Terminus, but humans were up-and-comers in the Citadel’s underbelly, and a new source of revenue. She’d wanted to get a piece of the action while there was still action to be had. Drugs, mostly. Human women too. The females were popular on Omega because they looked like asari but were far easier to manage.

“I don’t do kids,” she’d said. The boss for the Reds that day—a man named Chavek—had laughed and ruffled the top of Shepard’s head. Aria had never seen a human with red hair at that point in time. Not like the kid’s. Now things were a bit different.

“You’ll do this one,” Chavek had said. “She’s a quick study. Grows on you.” Shepard **did** grow on you in a very odd way. Once she’d finished clinging to Aria’s leg the next thing she’d done was proudly present the warlord with her refurbished pistol: the kid had lifted it off a batarian slaver. The Hegemony was already making headway in the Sol System despite the Turians’ best efforts to keep the newest galactic species cut off from the rest of Citadel space. Bad blood, really, and all three groups were far too aggressive.

“Can you do anything with that?” Aria had asked. The pipsqueak nodded, promptly turning around and shooting the salarian they had tied up in the cargo hold. The bullet went straight through his chest. The salarian **had** been Omin Res, a junkie deep in debt who’d been caught lifting credits. Omin died the same way he’d lived; grovelling, choking on his own blood with yellow staining his lips.

After she’d watched him suffocate, mini-Shepard had turned to her minder and politely asked for better bullets. Something that killed a little bit quicker, she’d said. Shepard had been quieter back then. Not really withdrawn, but maybe a bit sad. She had no family to speak of, but Chavek wasn’t quite sure how long she’d been an orphan. He’d patted her head and promised to get her better ones for her birthday.

“See?” Chavek said, beaming down at the kid like a proud, exultant father. Aria was a father too, but she’d never met her brat. The mother wouldn’t talk to her and Aria wasn’t in the business of grovelling. Shepard hadn’t been too bad though, all things considered. Humans didn’t live that long and this one was destined for a life of violence. Her time amongst the living would be short.

“Perfect, really.” Chavek continued. “A gift to the Reds. Kids like this are one in a million.”

Aria had crouched in front of Shepard, staring at her intently. The kid had a strange speckled pattern over the bridge of her nose and across her cheeks similar to an asari, but her eyes were gem-green like a turian’s. Bit too big, though. Her skin was disturbingly soft.

“Ever met an asari before?” she asked. Mini-Shepard had shook her head.

“I heard ‘bout you,” she’d corrected in an affable, quick-witted way that Aria would soon come to know her by. Shepard delved a bit too deep into the dark humor, but her only real flaw was how hung up she got on her teammates. _Something, something Akuze_ , Liara had told her. Aria never bothered to remember the details.

“And what do they say about me, doll?” she asked, not unkindly.

“That you live forever,” Shepard had said matter-of-factly, her words spoken with a bit of a lisp. “That asari are better than turians. Batarians too. They stink.”

Aria had allowed herself to smirk. The kid had shot the salarian, so she gave her a candy. She hadn’t known how the human would react to it, but the tiny monster had shovelled it down her throat like someone who was starving. Aria had affectionately patted her head.

The minute her skin touched the child’s she’d stopped what she was doing, frowning deeply. Shepard’s hair had been very soft and flimsy, not at all like asari crests. “They’re right,” she’d said, deciding a little white lie never hurt anyone. “I **will** live forever. Stay away from the turians, kid. No good for you.” Then she’d turned to Chavek. “Eezo?” she asked. The Red had nodded.

“Soon,” he promised. “We’ll get her an implant. Top of the line.”

“Get one now,” Aria ordered, letting go of Shepard and standing to her full height. She nodded to the child as she straightened her jacket. “Or you’ll have problems.” The pipsqueak had gone back to clinging to her leg, eying the salarian’s corpse slouched over the chair. Shepard looked lonely.

“How much do you want for her?” Aria asked. The offer had been serious. The kid would have made an amazing runner back on Omega, and it would have been a shame if she ended up as some merc’s dancer.

“Not for sale,” Chavek said, tapping the side of his nose and blinking his left eyelid in a strange human gesture. The constant _thrum_ of the freighter had rattled the walls. “She ain’t trained yet. Give her a few more years and we’ll send her to you as a liaison. Consider it a gesture of goodwill.”

It wasn’t goodwill but a deflection; a stalling tactic designed to pacify her until she went back to her ship. Although Aria could have killed the man and simply taken the kid, she didn’t pursue it. The profits from the human trade routes were worth more than some lost street urchin. She promptly forgot about it.

The Reds never did send her Shepard. Humans died in the underground all the time and Aria figured the redhead with asari freckles had met the same fate. Unfortunately Shepard was a bit like a cockroach. She was hard to kill like one, too. Twice more Aria saw her. The first time had been shortly after the little monster had gotten her newly minted Spectre threads. Shepard had been following a trail of bodies left by some slavers all the way to a bar on Cartagena Station. Aria had been meeting with a rival to discuss a potential ceasefire.

The ceasefire hadn’t held, but the impression that Shepard had left on her did.

“I made it!” Shepard said, grinning ear to ear as she downed another drink. There’d been a fresh-faced, Colony-marked, rather good-looking turian standing behind her; proud as a krogan with a sniper rifle perched between his talons. The turian hadn’t said anything to Aria, but she’d watched him and he’d watched her. An understanding of mutual dislike had passed between them, swirling in the air like vapor.

The second time Aria had run into Shepard had been shortly after the attack on the Citadel. The newsfeeds had been full of rumors of a failed invasion, so they’d met in yet another bar down another back alley that was even more dangerous than the last. A’daia, the station was called, in orbit around the sixth planet in the Trebia system. Shepard really **had** looked like a Spectre by that point, if a bit tired and older. Aria had been happy for her, which was a rare feeling that she didn’t quite know how to place. It was amazing how far the little gutter rat had gotten, really. Most of them died before they were ten.

The same turian had been following her that day. The brat came from a high-level clan, Aria realized when she took a better look at his markings. Straight-up Palaven born and bred. He’d been toting even larger guns and even better armor, but his expression had been just as wary. Shepard had seemed no bigger than a Kahjian shrimp standing next to him: tiny, armed to the teeth, and _spiky_. Her waist had been thinner than his.

When Aria had stepped closer to Shepard, the turian had come between them. His clawed hand had flexed casually around the trigger on his rifle. His mandibles flared, teeth poking through an unamused expression.

“Bodyguard?” Aria asked, unimpressed. Shepard had shook her head, a flush of delight staining her cheeks. She’d seemed so happy.

“Teammate,” she’d said. “My best friend. His name’s Garrus.”

“Last name?”

“Vakarian,” he’d supplied, cold and clipped. The flange to his voice was especially noticeable. Definitely from Palaven then, but he didn’t carry himself like someone who was working his way through the Hierarchy. The two of them had been nothing and everything alike all at once. They both moved like Spectres.

Aria had heard about Shepard’s death through the grapevine not long afterwards. When she did she’d felt a twinge of sadness that was more akin to losing a prized ship than a person. The little monster was a valuable asset that had been killed by bureaucracy. She hated the Council for it.

Later on, she’d learned the location of her corpse.

Aria had felt the loss more keenly when Shepard’s shadow of a turian had showed up on her station. He’d been just as big and twice as angry, only a thousand times more lethal and ready to take out his rage on her perps. The two of them had talked once or twice over drinks: to smooth out relations, Aria had billed it. When he’d shown up she’d tried to pry out the reason why he was skulking all over her territory. She’d been around turians long enough to read their facial expressions and she didn’t like what she saw.

Then he’d started killing her men.

Two years. Almost two years of that shit, the giant raptor burrowing his way into the belly of Omega like a virus. He’d recruited a team, taking on a human nickname—a tribute to _her_ , Aria thought with a sneer—and started making a mess of the black market. If there was one thing she disliked more than uptight turians sticking to the law, it was unhinged ones.

Now Shepard was back, wandering around in a drug-induced haze, making an even bigger mess than the one she’d started. Aria was _this close_ to killing her. Liara was next.

“Hand on your nose,” she muttered, walking into her office and throwing her jacket over a yet-unruined couch. Her room was immaculate, the white seats spotless. The low blue lights lining the ceiling in-between the metal bars made them look a bit like ribs. High windows rimmed the office, overlooking the club. Their shutters were drawn, but a crack at the bottom showed the strobing pink pulses that passed over Afterlife. The muted _thump, thump, thump_ of the music vibrated the walls. “If you get blood on anything, I’ll kill you.”

Shepard kept her hand on her nose, the rag held to the bottom to stem the flow. Aria cleared off her desk, shoving a lamp so hard to the side it fell to the red-lit floor. Better the desk than the couch, she reasoned. The couch cost money, and Shepard’s armour had too many sharp edges that could cut through the fine white leather. She’d had it imported from Illium and it had cost her a fortune, along with several commandos on account of who she’d filched it from. _Uptight Eclipse_ **_bitch_** _._ She snapped her fingers and pointed to the desk.

“There,” she said, rolling up her sleeves. “Sit.”

Shepard did, hoisting herself onto the ledge. Her back was hunched and legs splayed like a gangster, but she was still short enough her feet swung several inches off the ground. Sniffling loudly, the ex-Spectre dabbed gently at her nose. The blackness around her eye was turning blacker from where Aria had punched her. Her bottom lip was split. The asari gestured one of her guards forward, then held out her hand towards the human.

“Grenades,” she said. Shepard glared at her from behind the cloth but reached down and unclipped her belt, handing them over without complaint. Aria then handed them to the krogan standing behind her. It was a truce of sorts. “Guns too.”

“No.”

Never mind, not a truce. Aria gave her a look that would chill Noveria. “Guns too, or no turian. Not in one piece.”

Shepard glared further but handed them to the krogan, who took them away. Then minute the guard left the room Aria raised her hand and slapped the kid hard.

“That’s for fucking up my club,” she said. Shepard spit blood and swayed to the side. She snarled in a strange way, Eezo automatically flaring around her hands as she jerked her head towards Aria. Aria hit her again, knocking off her hood. “ **That’s** for leaving the turian on my station. How dare you.”

“I didn’t leave him!” Shepard protested, but already Aria was grabbing her face, holding her steady while she lifted up her eyelids to check her pupils. Humans reacted strangely to sand. Their eyes glowed red like everyone else’s, but the black pits in the centers got swollen like an asari during a mind-meld. “I died, you crazy fu-”

“What are you on?” Aria demanded. Shepard’s response was bitter.

“Nothing,” she insisted. Her eyes were no longer glowing, but they were still ringed with red. There were cybernetics in them holding the separate pieces together. Glowing cracks in her face pulsed red, too. Her skin was ghastly white, otherwise. Even the speckled pattern across her nose bridge had paled. “ **Nothing** ,” she repeated. “Miranda was telling the truth. It’s my implants. They’re reacting poorly to it.”

“Reacting poorly to what?” Aria asked, stepping back and grabbing a nearby napkin to wipe her hands off with distaste. Her knuckles burned to the point where she wondered if they were broken. Shepard sniffed unhappily and dabbed at her nose again.

“I’m agitated,” she said. “Can’t sleep. They react to stress.”

“You are your terrible implants,” Aria intoned, walking over to her glass-plated liquor cabinet. She pulled out a whole bottle of batarian ale, as she figured she needed it. Shepard laughed, her rough voice grating over the syllables.

“Tell me about it,” she said. Aria could feel the rage wafting off of her, thick and heavy. “Cerberus can suck a krogan’s dick. Multiple dicks, at once.”

“So you work for them now?” Aria asked, an ugly taste in her mouth. On some level she knew that she’d have to kill her: the gutter rat that had tried to go good only to fall back to the shadows. If Aria had possessed a heart she would have felt sorry for her. Some people had no luck.

After she poured herself a glass she offered the bottle to Shepard. This time Shepard took it, grabbing the flute around the stem and chugging loudly. She looked exhausted.

“Unwillingly,” she admitted, letting out a sigh of relief and wiping her mouth once she was done drinking. She screwed her eyes shut as if to stave off a headache, her lips twisting into a frown. “They found my corpse. Brought me back.”

Cerberus could do it, Aria knew. Cerberus **would**. She didn’t tell Shepard about her own involvement: it was a card she planned to use for later.

“How long were you dead?” she asked out of mild curiosity, feigning nonchalance. Shepard shrugged and looked down at her slightly scabbed hands. Aria watched in real time as she picked at the skin. She watched the way the skin stitched itself back together again shortly thereafter, like foam sealing around a window. Full of cybernetics, then. Nanites for sure.

“I’m not sure,” Shepard admitted. Aria took it as fact. “It’s a temporary arrangement with them. Cerberus has my ship and my implants aren’t grafting properly. They woke me up too soon. Once I get my team back, I’ll be on my way.”

“Is that why you’re here for the turian?” Aria said, sinking down onto her couch with a groan. She crossed her legs and pinched the bridge of her nose for patience. Shepard nodded vigorously, lips pressed together in a painful smile. It made the scars on her face warp with the movement.

“Went looking for him on the Citadel,” she admitted, “Didn’t think Cerberus was telling the truth, but he’d buggered off. I tracked him here. Got Kasumi instead.”

“Keep Kasumi out of my club.”

“Yes, boss.”

“He goes by the name _Archangel_ now.” Aria admitted, nursing her glass of batarian ale. She looked towards the windows, pink bars of neon spilling through the slats to turn the leather couch a pale shade of coral. “He’s killing my runners.”

Shepard swallowed visibly, but her expression remained calm. She had a good poker face. There were still bits of krogan dotting her hands, her fingers orange with dried alien blood. She didn’t seem to notice. “He’s a great sharpshooter,” she said. “The best.”

“Yes,” Aria murmured over the rim of her glass, taking a sip. “It’s why I haven’t been able to kill him yet.” She gestured in the air with her hand beside her head. “What did you do to him, by the way? To make him so… so….” she twirled her fingers in a circle next to her ear.

Shepard didn’t get it.

“He’s part of my squad,” she said. She was speaking like a gangster again; like the enforcer she’d been trained as until she’d fucked off to the military because her illegal implants had been causing problems that couldn’t be fixed with back-alley surgeries. “Was. _Will be_. I’m his commander, so I’ll take full responsibility.”

“I’m sure,” Aria said. She hoped for Shepard’s sake that she would. One more incident and she’d kill them both. Business was business. “You get him off my station and I’ll let bygones be bygones. If you wrap this up in less than a day I’ll let you have the doctor, too.”

“Alright,” Shepard said, nodding vigorously and taking a swig of her drink before slamming it down on the table in agreement. The glass hit the polished chrome with a _clink_. Shepard was already more jovial, perking up at the thought of action. She was swaying a bit, too. “It’s a deal. Where is he?”

“Past the Quarantine Zone,” Aria said, waving her hand in the general direction of the window with an elegant flick of her wrist. “The doctor is _in_ the Quarantine Zone. You’ll need to sign up as a merc to get by the blockade.” Shepard looked up at that, shoving her hands in her pockets, her armored boots scraping childishly against the floor. She wasn’t six anymore, but she still felt like it to Aria. All humans were babies. Children with guns.

“Quarantine Zone?”

“Seventeenth level, east side. The triads have had him and his team holed up there for days. They’re planning to kill him.”

Shepard’s face went paler: colorless, really, like Aria’s pristine white couch. Quickly jumping off the tabletop she made for the exit, hitting the hand-indent to force it to slide open.

“Have fun!” Aria crooned, turning her head to watch her go. She was met with the sudden increase of sound from the thunderous beat of the music; the sliding _shing_ of the entrance slamming shut. Bathed in silence, at least for a moment, the asari swished her drink counterclockwise in its glass, staring towards the bloody rag on her desk. When the door opened again she turned to the guard. It was the krogan, so big he could barely fit through the frame. Bands of blue ink ringed his upper right pauldron.

“Find the bouncer,” she said, taking a sip. The ale slid down her throat, burning hot and the color of acid. “Take care of him for me.”

“Yes, boss.”

He left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author’s Note**
> 
> So the two of us (Trebia and Ohtze) have The Itch™. _Mass Effect Andromeda_ is dropping this month, and in honor of the last three games and our ultimate OTP, we’re teaming up to write _The Meridian Word_ , born of brain gremlins, inappropriate gallows humor and eldritch horrors birthed from thoroughly tainted psyches. Both of us are long-time (obsessive) _Mass Effect_ fans, but neither of us are actually that active in the fandom itself— _Star Wars_ is where we usually scream into the void. You can find the links to our blogs on both our profiles, and Ohtze cross-posts stories to FF.net as well (so if you want to pick this story up there, you can do so).
> 
> _The Meridian Word_ updates every other week, 7pm EST. Additional lore tidbits are contained in the “Intel” section at the end of each chapter. For the readers of our other (ongoing) stories—have no fear. Those are being updated too.
> 
> Enjoy folks! We hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing it.
> 
> **Intel**
> 
>   * The Tenth Street [**Reds**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Citadel:_Old_Friends) were a gang to which Earthborn Jane Shepard belonged to before she enlisted in the Alliance military at the age of eighteen.
>   * A military incident on Akuze occurred in the year 2177, resulting in the death of fifty marines. Commander Shepard was the [**Sole Survivor**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Akuze) of that marine unit. 
>   * [**Turian**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Turian) colony markings are an old holdover from the bygone Unification Wars. During this period of civil unrest in the Turian Hierarchy, turians took to wearing emblems and applying facial markings to differentiate themselves from members of opposing colonies.
> 



	2. Spectre

The day she died was a normal one, punctuated by a few routine arrests and more than a little obsessive re-reading over her last message.

Garrus Vakarian’s life post-Sovereign was a tragic comedy of trying to maintain a schedule while coming to terms with the shell-shocking ride he’d experienced on the _Normandy_. Half the time he felt like someone else was inhabiting his body, witnessing the surreal events that transpired outside of it after the Reaper invasion. The massive amounts of debriefing from both the Alliance, the Council, then his own Hierarchy had wrung him out. Then came the separation.

First Liara jetted off to Thessia, then Tali to the Migrant Fleet for her Pilgrimage. Wrex had abruptly parted ways with the crew after getting word from his home planet about clan business that he had to attend to. The Alliance called back Shepard and Williams to the Sol system. C-Sec was blowing up his inbox with high priority messages not long after.

_Get your ass back to work_ , was Pallin’s subject line on the first message. It came during another sleepless night spent erasing and re-writing drafts of his messages to Solana. He never had the guts to hit “send” on any of them. Garrus didn’t know where to begin on explaining the whole situation to her, let alone his father. Both their communications to him, vid and text, had flooded in after he came back to his tiny apartment in Kithoi Ward. The bulk of them remained unopened. 

Garrus felt isolated. Sometimes, a bit angry. He could’ve pegged the feeling on the fact that the red tape was five klicks long and two governments deep between him and Shepard, but a clenching sensation in the pit of his stomach told him there was something more to it. All the two of them could manage by way of keeping in touch was the message chain they’d established, pinging the comm buoys between the Serpent Nebula and the Sol system.

_Normandy touched down on Earth,_ she’d wrote him not long ago. _Feels weird, turning her over to maintenance. Won’t be allowed back on until she’s done with her tuneups. They’re turning the Mako over to the grease monkeys._

The message had sent Garrus into a tailspin of anxiety. He’d logged over eighty hours of programming the firing algorithms on that gun turret: now all his careful, painstaking efforts were being washed down the drain while Alliance computers scrubbed the carefully constructed code from the Mako’s mainframe. They were going to die a slow death in a datamine somewhere. He just knew it. 

The two of them talked a lot about reconstruction efforts on the Citadel. What was left to repair and what hadn’t even been looked over yet. Some wards wouldn’t be habitable for years. In between irreverent, brief messages, they’d made half-hearted plans to try a dextro-levo restaurant in Tayseri Ward. Shepard briefly touched on Kaiden’s memorial service, held at Alliance Command in the city closest to where he grew up. _Vancouver_ , she called it.

The ceremony was a grand event, and it gave the turians’ brand of _grandiose_ a run for their money. A picture attachment soon followed of a lush, green forest enclosing a city of metal skyscrapers, shrouded in mist. Snow-capped mountain ridges loomed off in the distance.

_I’ve never been here for more than a dry dock,_ she admitted, and he could hear the sound of her voice through the tone in her writing. It was awkward. _Is Palaven anything like this?_

_No_. His messages were always brief.

Shepard was both terrible and very good at taking snapshots: she put a lot of care into them, but sometimes she managed to obscure the focus with part of her finger or mess up the dimensions on her omni-tool. Guns and grenades were more her thing. After a few months of dragging his heels, Garrus finally answered Pallin’s call and got back to work. He needed it, he decided: the stability of routine. Routine wasn’t exactly the word he’d used to describe what he did, but maybe that was what was missing. Hopefully it would get rid of the isolation.

“You joining us or moping?” Lamont asked him one day. The young human C-Sec officer—along with a couple others that worked the same beat in Kithoi Ward—were clocking out from their twelve-hour shift, heading down to the precinct’s preferred dive bar. Garrus thought about it for a moment, looking down at his desk. The strange, knotted sensation beneath his carapace was bad these days: tight, and sort of claustrophobic. _You need friends._

_I have friends,_ he immediately shot back at himself, but he knew he hadn’t been getting out much beyond work. It was his fault. Garrus let out a huff of breath, standing up and working out a kink in his neck. “Sure,” he said. It would be good for him.

Lamont whistled low, tossing the keys in her hand. Then she sauntered out the door.

The Precinct's favorite dive bar was a greasy, ill-lit place with fuzzy extranet screens clouded over by dust. The food either tasted under-cooked or overcooked depending what mood you caught the cook in, but the batarian that ran the place was more than generous with his law-enforcement discounts. Many a rookie had stumbled out of the establishment pants-on-their-head drunk. Garrus himself had more than enough nausea-induced memories fueled by his poison of choice—a dextro Heat Sink. He didn’t drink that often these days. Maybe it was because she wasn’t there.

It was slow at the bar when he and the other C-sec officers pulled up, putting their squad car in park. When they walked into the room it was mostly emptied. All three of them bellied up to the counter, opting out of sitting until they had a drink in hand. Garrus wasted time on his omni-tool while they waited for the batarian to finish scrubbing out their glasses. They got suspiciously dirtier with every swipe of the rag he took to them while they decided on their orders. Lamont muttered under her breath that it was probably on purpose.

“You gonna order or you gonna keep readin’ what she sent you last week?” Lamont asked. The young human shoved her fringe out of her eyes to get a better look at the screen of Garrus’ omni-tool, her hair sticking up in a comical way that reminded him of a vid that Shepard had shown him of a bird native to Earth.

_See?_ she’d said. _A cockatiel. You have a crest, he has a crest—I rest my case._ ”

Garrus couldn’t remember what her “case” was or why she’d showed him the vidclip to begin with. All he could remember was the bird and Shepard’s teeth, glowing blue from the light of the vidscreen.

A voice to his left stole Shepard’s face from his mind’s eye, bringing him back to the present. Bar. Citadel. Definitely not the _Normandy_.

“We’re senior officers. We don’t pay for our own drinks when we’ve got a perfectly capable rookie who can do it for us,” T'Erava was saying. She was an asari easing out of maidenhood with the aplomb of a disgruntled varren. The alien leaned around Garrus’ bulk to remind the human standing on his right of that very important C-Sec rule: rookies pay for everything.

Very casually T'Erava reached over and pinged the _X_ hovering at the corner of Garrus’ omni-screen. Shepard’s words folded in on themselves and disappeared back into his inbox. He felt his mandibles twitch with frustration, staring at the space where her words had been. A moment later he shrugged the feeling off. _It’s nothing._

“I keep forgetting privacy isn’t sacred when you’re sneaking looks at my screen every five seconds when we’re on duty,” Garrus complained good-naturedly, scrubbing his palm over his crest. He shifted his weight over to his other leg. At T'Erava’s piercing _you don’t fool me, Vakarian_ look, Garrus crumpled.

“I can’t think of how to word the response,” he admitted. It was an open-ended invitation for advice: something he’s failed to solicit from either of his beat partners, or _anyone_ for that matter. Garrus Vakarian was damn good at a damn many things, but writing a coherent, well-worded reply to Jane Shepard at this point in his life was not one of them. He was in over his head.

“You better hope she’s not got a read-receipt on that thing. If she does you’ve got her hanging with _read at 23:40_ for like, what? Four days now? Soul crushing.” Lamont whistled in sympathy, shaking her head and its unruly mop of a fringe. The barkeep finally wandered down to them after making a half-hearted attempt at cleaning the glasses with the spotty rag. Lamont placed their orders and negotiated the surrender of a bowl of pretzels from under the bar. The batarian ambled off to pour their drinks.

Garrus set his elbows on the counter-top, then put his brow into his spread hands. He exhaled loud enough to make the air shriek through his larynxes, the sound downright ill-tempered. A growl of frustration, to be exact.

T'Erava—who had taught him the book on Citadel civil code—opened her mouth, no doubt to dispense some worthy female advice on the matter. Just then the thudding, synthetic tune from the extranet announced a breaking news announcement.

The three of them turned to the screen, along with a few others tucked into the darkened booths at the back. All eyes were on the announcer as the bartender set down chilled beer for T'Erava and Lamont, including three fingers of Turian brandy in a tumbler for Garrus. Soon the screen panned away from the flashing graphics to focus on a somewhat familiar face. There were two boxes Garrus sorted reporters into: those Shepard was cordial to and those she laid out with a Haymaker. Emily Wong was a professional that fit into the first.

“This is Emily Wong with FCC News, bringing you a breaking announcement from the Alliance News Network.” The young human’s face looked larger than life, her voice blasted out from the speakers at a decibel that nearly made Garrus ask the bartender to turn it down a notch.

“Oh, boy. Hold onto your asses, kids,” T'Erava droned, picking up her beer and turning away. “It’s gonna be a doozy.”

“Alliance military command has released an urgent bulletin through their press office. A critical incident with reported casualties has occurred in the Omega nebula sixteen standard hours ago.”

What system was Shepard’s last message relayed from? The comm buoy had coordinates from somewhere deep in the Attican Traverse, nowhere near the Omega nebula. It was clear out of the way of the Terminus Systems. Garrus lets himself relax his grip on his glass, forcing himself to shake the tension out of his shoulders. _You’re jumping at shadows. Ignore it._

“We can confirm per Alliance officials that the SSV _Normandy_ was destroyed by an unknown aggressor and broke apart over an uninhabited world in the Amada system. Among the twenty-plus casualties reported is the recent savior of the Citadel and decorated N7 officer, Commander Jane Shepard.”

A distant part of Garrus’ brain registered the invisible punch he felt cleave through his chest: sudden, visceral _shock_ that caused the glass in his hand to shatter. People in the bar turned to look at him strangely. T’Erava shook her head.

“Another hot military type down the drain,” she opined. Garrus realized he was swaying. “Damn waste.”

“–a rescue and recovery mission is underway–”

His aural senses faded to selective snatches of the news report. A ringing noise filled the void. Garrus pushed himself back, wavering on his feet. He sagged abruptly. Lamont saw the movement and let out a shout, reaching for his elbow.

“–survivors of the incident are being debriefed–”

His two co-workers didn’t connect the dots for a moment, their eyes on the screen. Then:

“Wait,” said Lamont, her voice rising a pitch. “Wasn’t she your commander?”

When the news sunk in they both look vaguely horrified, their faces turned to him. Garrus didn’t want to acknowledge what was happening. If he looked at their faces that made it more real because they were seeing it too. _It’s not real. It can’t be._

“Many questions remain unanswered by the Alliance as they conduct their investigation into this tragic–”

T’Erava was scrambling to prop up his other half. Garrus felt his weight sag dangerously close to the floor. The choking sensation in his chest was similar to when his mother had sat him down and explained how terminal her illness was. He was ready to bring up whatever was is in his stomach. Everything seemed magnified and blurred.

“Vakarian. Vakarian?”

“Garrus? Anyone home?”

_Vakarian? Garrus_ –

_I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon before_ , he thought. In extranet vids the protagonist was always told about the death of someone important to them. The scene would slow down, the dramatic music swelling before coming to a shuddering halt. In their C-Sec manuals they were given instructions on how to deal with trauma _._

_Spirits._

His brain took a full minute to stop racing and process what was laid out for his sensory perception. The news. The sound of Emily Wong’s voice telling him that Shepard was dead. The edge of the bar bit into his balled fists. The brandy slopped over the counter to trickle to the floor in a slow _drip, drip_. Lamont was shaking him by the shoulder.

“Garrus, let’s leave,” T'Erava was saying on his other side. She was trying to quietly guide him away from the bar by the elbow, her voice low and insistent in his ear. “C’mon, we’ll head back and get on the line with the Alliance and see what–”

Garrus detached her hand, then Lamont’s. He walked out of the bar with his ears ringing, the words from the news crawl burned into his retinas.

COMMANDER JANE SHEPARD OF THE SSV _NORMANDY_ : HERO KILLED IN ACTION AT AGE 29

* * *

 

The Council was holding a public memorial for her in the Presidium Gardens tomorrow. The thought of attending made bile rise in his throat.

He should’ve been there with her and the crew. He could’ve done something. Jeff had sent him a vid not long after the news broke with the details of what had happened, explaining every second of it. He didn’t spare Garrus the gory details, and for that he was grateful. Garrus had a notion that Joker wasn’t supposed to be feeding him **any** information, but he managed to read between the lines and makes an educated guess about the assault. 

He had to bite back a keen over the cause of her death: suffocation after her air hose disconnected. Re-entering Alchera’s atmosphere in just an exo-suit.

Garrus wondered what it was like to boil alive. To have the breath stolen from you and sucked out into the cold vacuum of space. A contrast in temperatures, he imagined. They hadn’t even recovered her body yet.

_Her corpse_ , his mind corrected him clinically.

Right. Time to quit. He’d already waited once and he’d lost her.

In the end Garrus was more than ready when he typed out his resignation letter and laid it on Pallin’s desk, two days after the announcement of her death. He didn’t know where he was going or what the hell he was doing, but it didn’t involve staying in C-Sec or even on the Citadel. That much was certain.

Pallin was not pleased.

“I know what this is about Vakarian, and I want you to consider your options and weigh their outcomes before I accept **this**.” His boss’ voice was grating after examining the letter, his sub-vocals radiating sympathy and gruff condemnation as he placed it carefully on his desk. _Tough it out, get over it. Don’t  throw away your career over a dead alien._ Garrus could hear the words the older turian was expressing through the tilt of his brow-plates and the tightening of his fist on the data pad.

“With respect, sir, I’ve considered my options. I can’t go on serving in this capacity. I’m unfit for duty.” He couldn’t even muster a shred of shame in what he was saying to his superior.

“Then take some leave, get it out of your head. Go home, hash it out with your father. Just don’t do anything rash.” Garrus didn’t know whether to be grateful or let down that he was being let go so easily. The older turian’s posture was neutral, his expression tightly guarded with his mandibles drawn close to his mouth. _Disappointment_. Garrus had seen the expression mirrored on his father’s face many times before.

“I’ve given that consideration, sir, but none of those are options for me anymore. Thank you.”

There was nothing more he could say to the executor. Garrus saluted him in the traditional Cipritine fashion and backed out of the office. When he felt the _swoosh_ of the door closing, he realized with a dawning sense of dread that there would be an incoming message from his father in the next hour or two about the incident. Venari Pallin walked a beat with Castis Vakarian, decades back. The news of his son’s resignation would depend on how fast the aging turian could type out a message and hit “send."

Garrus began typing out his own explanation on his omni-tool in an effort to head him off. The fact that he’d have to tell his father seemed like such a small-time task, yet enormous all at once. Garrus had shoved the knowledge of it so far to the back of his mind for the last forty-eight hours that he’d failed to address it before walking into the executor’s office. He tried not to think of the stinging disappointment the turian would feel after opening the message from Pallin and reading its contents.

In his mind’s eye, Garrus could already see it. His father would be sitting in his study on Palaven, the sun’s last fingers of light crawling across family photos and framed commendations strewn across flattened surfaces and coral-colored walls. Down the hall Solana would be tending to their mother’s needs, fiddling with the tubes and machines she’s hooked up to pump fluids and air into her withered body. Their father would be sitting in silence, his wife dying down the hall as read about his son’s failure second-hand. It was a common theme between the two of them.

The void in Garrus’ chest felt like it was widening by the minute the longer he stayed on the Citadel. He had to get back to his rathole apartment and start packing. He had to leave everything and the memory of her. Every ward and screen had her face and day of of her death scrolling in the marquee. Garrus erased the half-done message and powered down his omni-tool.

_ >>> _MESSAGE DELETED, CONNECTION TERMINATED

His fingers paused over the keys before closing out of the screen, distracted by a quick, jittery movement to his left. Pallin’s office was situated a level above the main offices of C-Sec, partially overlooking the release area close to where the desk sergeant sat. When he turned Garrus caught sight of a familiar, rat-faced human at the counter, shrugging into a yellow jacket that had seen better days while emptying out the contents of a property bin into his pockets.

It was **Kishpaugh**. That _fucker_.

The oily man was a big-time pusher that had trafficked every kind of drug imaginable through the wards, sometimes fronting the goods to desperate addicts he knew would never pay off the debt. He’d then hired muscle to execute his debtors in a string of score-settling murders that stretched back nearly a decade. Although he was no longer working the case directly, the occasional victim would still show up on Garrus’ desk before being handed off to the appropriate officers. Yesterday had been one of those times. Booked on possession with intent to distribute: ten grams of sand.

It had to be the fourth time Kishpaugh had walked on a low-balled bail amount or dropped charge. He’d never seen the inside of a cell for more than seventy hours. The courts always slapped a hefty fine on the dealer and sent him on his way.

_Shoot him_ , she would have said, but Shepard was dead. Kishpaugh wasn’t, walking out of C-Sec like he owned the place.

He saw red.

Garrus waited until the human had cleared the entrance to headquarters before taking the lift down, his pace single-minded as he stalked him. His service weapon and credentials had already been turned in. He had nothing on Kishpaugh to put him on the side of the law save for his sense of right and wrong, but Garrus didn’t care. Shepard was dead and Kishpaugh wasn’t. His steady flow of drugs kept streaming into the Citadel and C-Sec did nothing. The human was easy to pick out in a crowd. He kept his head low and his eyes up, ferreting out potential threats with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Garrus knew he probably kept a knife or pistol in a concealed liner.

_Shoot him_. Shepard had been an enforcer for the Reds before she went straight, then a Spectre. There’d been one too many rough arrests in Garrus’ career: it was part of the reason why Kishpaugh had walked. A gift from his Spirits-damned father.

Eventually he caught up to the man when he took a turn down an empty corridor near the mass transit terminal. The human wasn’t quick enough to avoid him. Garrus checked him bodily into a narrow alleyway at the back end of a market sector, pinning his arms with a one-handed precision. He could hear the _crunch_ of cartilage as he slammed Kishpaugh’s face into the metal siding. Any more pressure and he would’ve ending up crushing the human’s skull.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Kishpaugh,” Garrus declared, bending down to speak through gritted teeth into the human’s ear. He tightened his fist around Kishpaugh’s wrists until the bones popped. The man let out a shout of pain.

“V-Vakarian?” he gasped, his words muffled as he tried to work air through a broken nose. He stopped struggling long enough gulp air into his lungs through his mouth. A few fat red drops of blood smeared from Kishpaugh’s cheek against the wall. The tint of the liquid reminded Garrus of Shepard’s hair.

“Your supplier, Kishpaugh. It’s time to give up their coordinates before I start on the other bones in your face.” 

Garrus’ talons pressed indents into the human’s pasty flesh, hard enough to make cuts. The threat of one of them near his femoral artery made the drug dealer seize with fear before his body started to convulse. Garrus peeled him off the wall long enough to spin him around and square off. For a moment Kishpaugh looked ready to talk. Then he got a gleam in his eye that spoke of defiance.

“Fuck you,” he spat, hocking up enough bloody phlegm to spit in Garrus’ face. It slide off his plates to plop to the ground below.

Garrus switched his grip. Both hands on Kishpaugh’s throat, then. Humans rarely reach the average height of a turian male, and Kishpaugh wasn’t exactly a prime example of physicality for his race. Garrus was a good seven feet tall.

“Hard way it is, then,” he said, and to his own ears his voice sounded chipper. “Remember, Kish: three fingers up when you decide to talk.”

Garrus tightened his hold around the man’s windpipe, lifting him up by the throat. The man gasped and kicked, his pulse beating wildly beneath his palm. It fluttered and jumped. The skin compressed. In the end Garrus got a name: Omega.

_Shoot him,_ Shepard said. Garrus was beyond giving a damn, but he wasn’t at that point. Not yet.

* * *

 

He sold off his old Incisor that’d been kept well-oiled and shrouded in its casing, trading it in for a sleek Mantis from Kassa Fabrications procured through a custom order. It cost Garrus nearly two months of accrued salary and enough credit to empty out his “thanks for helping to save the Citadel,” account, gifted to him by the store manager. Afterwards he maxed out other perks, calling in debts left, right, and center to shore up supplies and ammo.

In the end, it took only a few keystrokes for Garrus to veer his life off its present course and start it down an uncertain path. He booked passage on a freighter bound for the Omega Nebula within thirty-six hours and never looked back.

Omega was—to use one of Shepard’s loquacious descriptions—a rancid shithole of a place. And at the top of this steaming pile was Aria T’Loak, the self-proclaimed judge, jury, and executioner for most of the business dealings on the slag heap. It wasn’t even so much that she was self-proclaimed. Aria rarely proclaimed anything: she simply **did,** and expected everyone to follow.

For a while Garrus tried to fly under her radar, picking off low-level pimps and sand dealers. He adopted a moniker given to him by an old human couple he’d saved from a vorcha mugging in his first few minutes on the station. _Archangel_. It took a few extranet searches later on to figure out what an “angel” was, and it made him feel closer to Shepard. Her species’ version of a spirit, in a way. It also served as a substitute for his own surname, which he was unwilling to associate with what he was doing on Omega. He made it his habit to drop the new one every chance he got when operations ran smoothly.

“Tell the Blood Pack that Archangel said their time is up,” he growled into one sand dealer’s ear. The practice became as natural to him as breathing.

_Kill them for me_ , Shepard would say in the dim-lit redness of Omega’s underbelly where he began to burrow. He was doing that now, his Mantis at the ready, each hit dedicated to a corpse he was fully aware he was far too attached to. His thoughts were constantly full of _her_.

Sometimes Garrus would see her in the darkness when he tried to sleep, his back propped against a dingy brown wall with the constant hum of hovercars to the left, glittering like beetles dipped in water as they spun along Omega’s central chasm.  He’d see her reach out. Nothing but blackness at first, then a blob of ink not quite so dark as the others would detach itself from the gloom, small and sad. Her hands would ghost across his mandibles, fingers running over colony tattoos, and on his worst days he’d wonder _why_ he was imagining his commander touching him; if he was really that desperate for a dead human woman. The answer was yes.

Sometimes, he’d try to reach back.

_Kill them for me_ , she’d gasp, reedy and weak. There would be red human blood running from her eyes and nose and strange rounded lips, capillaries burst from outer atmo exposure. Garrus had touched those lips once. They’d been so soft his breath had caught in his throat. He’d never felt anything like it before or since.

“Shepard,” he’d say on a wavering gasp, reaching back, but when he tried to draw her into his arms she’d always collapse, her phantom form folding in on itself like a wilted flower. The human would crumble in his grip, all burnt and withered, and when he cried out—talons scrabbling along an armored back—she’d disappear. There would just be his hands, empty and gloved. His gun at his side. The constant red luminescence of Omega would flicker above him.

There was a thing he’d learned once, from his C-Sec training manuals: something about time and distance dulling the ache. Garrus soon learned that was a lie, as the dreams kept getting worse. In an effort to keep the disturbances to a minimum, he cut back on sleep and upped the stims. _Kill them for me_ , Shepard begged, and he was trying. Sometimes when he’d killed too many, their many-colored brains splattering against the rust-hewn pavement, Garrus almost felt like she was there with him, her arms wrapped gently around his neck.

Others rallied to the cause once word spread about a vigilante plaguing Omega’s underbelly. One disillusioned turian he picked up in a bar, Sidonis, multiplied into ten other squadmates that ran the gamut from jaded security consultants to ex-mercs. There were even a few former C-Sec officers. All came readily and willing to the cause.

Months turned into a year. Then more months added onto that. The team numbered twelve, including himself. Garrus realized he’d stepped into her shoes, touting around a cause and a team and a goal. Outside of the missions and obsessive planning, there were moments of routine. Cleaning his rifle. Calibrating the sensors and fixing technical glitches that seemed to plague his visor like a pyjak infestation. He almost trashed it and bought a new model, but Shepard had teased him obsessively for always wearing it. The thought of getting rid of it was unbearable.

He kept fighting. The sleeping got _less_.

Things started shaping up in small ways. The rate of overdoses plummeted, the violence in a few neighborhoods stagnated to manageable levels. People started depending on his team as protection against the triad of gangs on Omega. **No one** touched Aria—she was still too tough to crack—but things had a way of getting back to her. She had her fingers in everything and Garrus was chopping them off.

“My respect-through-proxy only goes so far,” she warned him once during an omni-call: he wasn’t sure how she’d gotten his number, but in hindsight it should have been a sign. “The kid knew how to speak to her betters: you don’t. Don’t make her cry.” She was speaking about Shepard.

Tense and shaking, Garrus hung up.

_Kill them for me_ , she pleaded, but the filth parade never seemed to end.

Soon afterwards an incident occurred when he least expected it to. The nights had been getting longer, the sleeping less frequent, if it happened at all. He’d been dropping weight for awhile by that point, the dermal layers of his face plates flaking off like untempered paint from what he was reluctant to acknowledge as stress. On that day that wasn’t really a day—because Omega was perpetually cast in shadow—he’d been walking the lower markets on a supply run, a hood drawn low over his face. The meagerly stocked kiosks and greasy food stalls had a dingy quality that no shopkeeper ever cared to scrub off. Garrus had imagined it’d take at least an acid wash to get off the layer of grime caked onto the metal that made up every surface in the station.

So fixated he was on the transition from dirty wall to dirty counter to dirty glass pane he almost missed the shade of tangerine smearing the surface of the storefront he was passing. Turning to face the source of the light—in retrospect—had been a monumentally stupid move.

“You’re looking at VI model 1.75AGB Commander Shepard, unlocked demo mode.” It must’ve been an automated response queued whenever someone came into its proximity—the electronics kiosk that obviously owned the VI projector was shuttered up for the night. The projector itself was bolted to the floor grates, forming the base for where the mirage stood in a dull orange haze. Some of the posture was recognizable, but most of it was an obvious imitation of the real thing.

Garrus felt a faint seizing in his chest. His jaw worked open before shutting, his brain miles behind the situation as he floundered for two words to string together.

The VI didn’t register his expression.

“Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy.” It offered him a salute, the face morphing into an artificial half-smirk. Whatever face mapping they had used to lift her dimensions from vids didn’t manage to catch the things that mattered: the fact that an old scar pulled the lower muscles on the left side of her upper lip into a unique quirk, or the fine pinpricks of brown that reminded him of colony markings on the ridges of her cheekbones. He kept on expecting her to wilt like a rotted flower.

Garrus felt a strange melange of emotions, intermingled with _dullness_. Chief among them was anger that some ambiguous _other_ would steal her likeness for a damned VI to profit off of. That they’d saturated the market with enough copies for it to show up in the ass-end of the Terminus where he’d specifically come to get away from her face projected everywhere in overwrought memorials and news vids. _Kill them for me,_ **his** Shepard was saying, and if he got his hands on its maker, Garrus planned to.

He barely registered the fact that he was walking away from the VI until the orange projection was out of his vision and he was left with the long, grimy view of the market stalls passing by him. Soon he  was nearly sprinting.

The Shepard VI called out a pre-programmed goodbye at him before he was out of earshot. “ _Good to see you again_.”

It all went to hell after that.

Shepard had introduced him to the human concept of something called Murphy’s Law during his time on the _Normandy_ . Simplified, the law was _everything that can go wrong will go wrong._ Ironically enough, this was voiced seconds before she gunned the Mako over a sleeping thresher maw while scouting for iridium on Chohe. Garrus hated it. The words haunted him.

Garrus wished a thresher maw was the least of his worries. It was only a few days after they’d gotten Sidonis back from a botched raid on the Blue Suns that he started recognizing the signs. He felt it in his gut before a shred of hard evidence turned up during a routine scan of the security systems—erased histories on the computer mainframes in their larger hideout.

His greatest pitfall, in retrospect, had been trusting the intel Sidonis had handed him, ignoring the nagging suspicion in his mind that his teammate could be working two angles.

Of course it was a setup. How else could they get to him? Through a teammate, coerced and pressed into service. It all came clicking home when he came back to a silent hideout after chasing a fake lead for hours.

Erash, Monteague, Mierin, Grundan Krul, Melenis, Ripper, Sensat, Vortash, Butler, and Weaver. Some were in pieces, shredded by shrapnel or frag grenades. Others were slumped artlessly over furniture, frozen in poses that indicated they’d tried to take cover. Blood from salarians, batarians, humans, and asari mingled into indiscernible puddles of brown matter. It reminded him of his childhood, strangely enough. When you mixed so many colors together you got an ugly splat of brown where all the vibrancy was leached into the murk.

Butler’s body was slumped over the banister as he passed it on his way to get to the cache of ammo he kept in the room above. No more than a kid, she’d been rivaled only by the batarian in tech skills. Her omni-tool was frozen on a screen, trying to dial out a warning for him. They had tried to fight _._ The scene conveyed by the carnage was a clear message written to Archangel from his enemies: _You brought this on them_. 

Garrus reached out to gingerly touch a talon to Butler’s bloodied brow. The first round clipped his shields from behind.

By the time he limped up to the room overlooking the bridge, he could see a barricade going up on the opposite side and the colors the mercs sported. _Eclipse, Blood Pack, Blue Suns._ There was an irony in the fact that the only thing that could bring the three to some kind of truce was the act of killing him. He had enough time to grab some extra rounds and enough incendiaries from the cache to take himself and whoever made it up to his perch to the Spirits.

A few seconds later, waves of bodies started swarming the hideout.

Garrus easily settled into the rhythm of picking off target after target, his visor racking up a kill count which simply kept climbing. He hoped to make it respectable for whoever got to his corpse first. If the afterlife was kind, it would be Shepard waiting for him just beyond the pale. The choke point on bridge was turning into a dumping ground for discarded corpses. His final stand, where sloppy stats wouldn’t tarnish his legacy. There was no better sniper in the galaxy and he knew it.

_Kill them for me._

Garrus was going to go down in the way Shepard should have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author’s Note**
> 
> Huge thank you to everyone who reviewed/kudo’d/bookmarked! We’re thrilled y’all are enjoying the story and hope you’re all having a great time with MEA.
> 
> **Intel**
> 
>   * Known as the Lynchpin of Omega, [**Aria T’Loak**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Aria_T%27Loak) orchestrated a seditious and brutal takedown of the former ruler of the space station, a krogan known as the Patriarch. Since then Aria has ruled Omega with an iron-fisted approach, and has little patience for bullshit.
>   * Alchera is the fourth planet orbiting the star of [**Amada**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Amada). The star is named after the ancient Egyptian _Temple of Amada_ , constructed by Pharaoh Thutmose III of the 18th Dynasty, dedicated to Amun and Re-Horakty. Amun-Ra was a major Egyptian Deity who retained chief importance in the New Kingdom pantheon with the exception of Atenist heresy under the Pharaoh Akenaten, who sought to erase the old Egyptian gods and replace them with a monotheistic religion. Upon his death this “heresy” was undone and Amun-Ra was “reborn” to his rightful status in the pantheon. A transcendental, self-made creator deity, Amun-Ra was the champion of the poor and the suffering. The cult surrounding him became so fervent and widespread that his position evolved to a virtual sort of monotheism, where the other gods became “manifestations” of his will.
>   * [**Corpalis Syndrome**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Diseases) is a disease that causes severe neurological degeneration in turians—Garrus’ mother was diagnosed with the illness at an ambiguous date, but was terminally ill by the events of _Mass Effect II._ There is no known cure, despite research projects underway to find one.
> 



	3. Jagannath

It was a bit like missing a limb.

Shepard could say this because she’d actually lost limbs before, and she knew what it felt like. Burnt up, she’d been—her body technically in one piece—but there hadn’t been much left, and she remembered that part too. Too much of it, really, and when Shepard had risen from the cold metal table, gasping and naked, wires sprouting from her back, she thought they’d forgotten her arm.

“No Shepard, they’re all here,” Miranda said. Shepard’s early days off of the slab were a bit like that—blank spots followed by too vivid colors and gasps for breath. Broken images replayed in a loop. She became fixed on specific sights and sensations, like itches between shoulder blades she couldn’t scratch.

“I don’t feel so good,” she said once Miranda and Jacob had whisked her away to the SR-2. Shepard remembered being bent over the porcelain throne in her skivvies, puking hard, her hands cracked and webbed with crimson. Who the fuck had thought it was a good idea to have her go back to the ship that she’d died in?

“Just nerves,” Miranda assured her. Her own hand was on the base of her head as she smoothed down sweat-matted hair. Shepard didn’t trust her yet, because Miranda wasn’t squad. She looked out for Shepard, though—a bit like a big sister—which was nice. She’d always wanted one. Getting back the limbs would have been nice too. She needed those to keep fighting.

After vomiting profusely Shepard had turned to the woman. She’d shown her the bloody stump of her right arm, a bit too wide-eyed for comfort. Everything seemed so bright.

“Forgot one,” she said. She felt so thin and stretched. Miranda’s expression had been sad.

“You **have** them, Shepard,” she’d said, gripping her hand in her own. Suddenly the arm was back. Shepard had been confused at first. Then it had clicked. Oh, right.

_“Where’s Garrus?”_

“NEXT!” yelled a merc at the bottom of the tunnel.

There was a whirring sound as an Eclipse mech stalked past; the sharp _hiss_ from its air brakes, the ground shaking hard beneath its pronged feet. A couple of asari dancers in tottering high heels and mauve bodysuits nimbly ducked around the machine and the line-up of would-be cannon fodder as they made their way into the club. Human mercs stood by the entrance to the sign-up area, wearing mismatched armour that looked a bit shabby.

As Miranda and Shepard passed they perked up, standing straighter as they stared with budding recognition towards Shepard’s face. Shepard flinched without meaning to, looking towards the ground; her fingers automatically clenched around the grip of her pistol. Her heart thudded painfully beneath her pitch-black breastplate.

Miranda followed behind her on her right, cold-faced and stony. Her equally black heels _clicked_ against the floor, her Cerberus colors on full display.

“Earth First!” one of the mercs shouted at her. Miranda looked towards him as he thumped his closed fist against the center of his chest with pointer and middle finger extended: a human supremacy call-sign. The Cerberus woman barely blinked, turning away with a bland expression as they continued down the corridor.

 _Two steps forward_ , Shepard reminded herself, breathing deep as she wandered into the red-lit staircase. _Three steps back,_ but everything was nerves. Blank spaces, splotched with color and blackness.

During the bad moments Chakwas told her to snap a rubber band across her wrist to keep herself focused. It was better than scratching at her arms and peeling back layers of artificial skin, but Shepard couldn’t do that here. There were no hoodie and no elastics. Just head-to-toe body armor, the right armguard dipped in red. Her hair was tied up a bun to show that she meant business. Inside the room at the bottom of the stairs there were more mercs lounging about. Shepard saw a Bloodpack vorcha with a giant pet varren. Blue Suns were sitting in plush leather seats along a curving wall, sniffing sand with asari dancers. Another Blue Sun was processing recruits through a single queue. It looked like it was staffed by a batarian.

Shepard felt sort of naked. Her scars were glowing in the dim light and everyone was looking at them, but _fuck_ wearing helmets. Fuck all this, it was taking too long. She’d just come for Garrus. Aria said the mercs had him—the very same mercs Shepard was strolling through, all casual-like—and she was having a hard time breathing properly at the thought.

There were hundreds of people signing up for the chance to kill him. She was surrounded by aliens who planned on murdering the only person she woke up screaming to; gasping and gagging as she sobbed for breath and lost her mind over the fact that he wasn’t there. Why couldn’t she kill them? Why couldn’t she maim them? Why couldn’t she do something, why couldn’t she make them **hurt**? She couldn’t stand this, where was her fucking hairband, her hand was twitching against the trigger on her Harpy. She was seeing double –

 _Breathe Shep_ , a familiar voice said. She felt a long-fingered hand against her back, a scaled palm pressed to her spine. Talons were curling against the soft fabric of her shirt. _Just breathe._

Behind the desk the batarian merc—dressed in Blue Suns gear with a datapad full of names—looked up. He quirked a folded brow in her direction: a question, paired with a leer.

“Well aren’t you sweet,” he crooned, his four eyes travelling up and down her body in a languid manner. Shepard **hated** having to go through this song and dance with him. _Option Two. Option Two_ _would be better._

“Let’s just carpet bomb them,” she’d said after they hightailed it out of Aria’s club before going back in for recruitment. They were standing outside Afterlife on the open-air catwalk. After ditching the hoodie and re-buckling her holsters Shepard had dragged her favorite rocket launcher out of the back of their personal transport. _Lucille_ was her name: a brand new friend from the Cerberus weapons locker. The only good thing about Cerberus was pilfering their armory, and Shepard was hoarding guns like a squirrel hoarded nuts.

“For the cause,” she’d explained when faced with Miranda’s skeptical expression. “For the cause, **okay**?” Then, when she looked back towards the trunk – “oh, wait. This one too.”

Leaning forward, Shepard grabbed an RPG and tried to mount it onto her back next to her Spectre-class sniper rifle, but there was no more back for her to mount it _on. Fuck the Council._ The trials and tribulations of being short.

The merc they’d picked up from the docks—Zaeed, in the pay of Cerberus—agreed with her. You could never have too many weapons, especially on Omega. Miranda had taken one look at Shepard’s overstuffed grab bag and promptly filched her toys.

“If you get yourself killed over a single mercenary in a slag heap on top of slag heap, we’re bringing you back, **again** , and this time it will hurt.”

“I won’t die,” Shepard had spat. She couldn’t. Cerberus had made sure of that and Shepard was determined to be the perpetual reminder of a proverbial one-night-stand where the Illusive Man had misplaced his condoms. No takebacks on **this** deadbeat kid. Who said she couldn’t hold a grudge? No one, that’s who. Her rep for ruffling feathers was golden.

Kasumi’s words had been more skilled.

“He might die in the assault if you go in too heavy,” she warned.

It was enough to send Shepard scurrying for the porcelain throne to puke up the coffee she’d choked down that morning. She wasn’t eating solid food yet. There was no toilet where the car was stopped, so she’d ended up vomiting in Aria’s bombed-out parking lot instead. There was orange on her hands that looked like krogan blood, but she didn’t remember any krogans except for the bouncer that she’d sweet-talked into letting her into the club with the weapons. Her conversation with Aria was a blur, punctured by mentions of _Garrus_. When Shepard asked how the blood had gotten there Miranda had given her a strange, unsettled look. She’d taken her black-clad hands between her own, cleaning away bits of pink, unidentifiable organ with a damp cloth. She’d given her a couple more stims too and checked her pupils.

“Do you remember why you’re here?” she asked.

Of course Shepard did.

“Garrus.”

“The _mercenary captain_ , Archangel. No carpet bombing.”

“Just a _little_ bombing.”

“Think of Garrus,” Kasumi urged, but Shepard was always thinking of Garrus. The only thing that preoccupied her more were her memories of boiling alive.

Mercland first, she finally conceded. If that didn’t work they were going to go with _Option Two: Shepard Blitz_. Even still Shepard didn’t know how long Miranda’s-plan-via-Aria was going to last. Batarians leering at her and calling her pet names was somewhat of a trigger. The last major incident had involved a smuggler at a bar on Cartagena Station. She’d gone up to get drinks, weaving through the press of the dancers, and when she’d sidled up to the counter he’d sidled up to her.

The batarian’s fingers had slid around the narrow span of her waist, his lips to her ear as he tried to drop something into her drink.

“Hey Sweetheart. You alone?”

Before she’d been able to turn around and pluck out his eyes, Garrus had gotten him; snapping the alien’s arm in six different places and nearly crushing his windpipe with a cold, furious expression. Good ol’ Garrus, always on her six: dependable, willing to put up with her terrible humor, aficionado of guns. He had shit taste in music and refused to let her drive any sort of vehicle without a baby harness, but no one was perfect.

Shepard remembered him looming over her the most; a constant shadow that acted a bit like a shield. She remembered warm fingers on her face carefully cupping the side of her head, a thumb stroking her cheek. A taloned hand pressed to the small of her back when she was anxious. Even now she could hear the signature rumble of his strange, reverberating voice, almost lackadaisical and drawling. Her toes curled in her boots as it washed over her like a warm blanket.

Best sharpshooter she’d ever know, Garrus Vakarian was. He should have been a Spectre. Without the _looming_ and his familiar warmth, Shepard felt naked. Garrus. Garrus? Oh god, he wasn’t here. Shots fired in a club. Her shots? She needed to find him, she was gasping, ribs breaking, no air in her lungs, where was Garrus –

There was a blank spot. Blackness. Shepard blinked and suddenly she was at the sign-up table, the tops of her armored thighs pressed against the edge of the ochre-colored metal as she balanced her weight on one leg and leaned against it. Had she walked forward? Must have, but she didn’t feel too good again. The batarian was still leering at her. Beside him was another Blue Suns merc—a turian with brown scales and a bare, tattoo-less face like Saren. The albino alien had kicked it months before she had, but just the thought of another barefaced chicken raptor was enough to make her anxious.

“What’s your name, honey?” the batarian asked.

Shepard counted backwards from ten and comforted herself with the knowledge that in an another reality she was snapping his neck. It was the only way that she was going to get through this with her sanity.

“Not your _honey_ , Big Boy.”

Beside her, ice-cold Miranda gave her a warning _hmph._ Strike one of one, Shepard knew. If she dipped into the negatives she was being sent back to the kiddie table, complete with sippy cup.

“You’re _someone’s_ doll,” the batarian replied, as if it were a foregone conclusion. Without meaning to Shepard pictured a turian with deep blue tattooes etched across an angular face that marked him from Palaven. She blinked once, twice, her fingers tightening around the handle on her pistol. Floating through space, her ribs breaking. Skin bubbling, then sloughing off beneath an exo-suit as the pale blue of _Alchera_ flew up towards her.

_Where’s Garrus?_

“Name?” the batarian repeated, his gloved fingers flicking lazily through a stream of data as he swiped them along a shimmering omni-screen.

“Impatient,” Shepard supplied, tapping her pistol on the top of the table as if it was nothing more than a pen.

“ _Impatient_?” the batarian said, looking up. Beside him the barefaced Blue Sun was pushing himself off the wall and stepping around the table. He was of average height for a turian, which by turian standards meant well over six feet. His crest fanned out behind him like a blade. Shepard felt her fingers twitch just a bit, but turned and kept her eyes fixed on his comrade. Her patience was getting worse by the second, and being in a red-lit chamber with no escape reminded her of the _Normandy_ burning.

“ _Very_ impatient,” Shepard clarified, her Harpy coming down on the top of the table with a metallic _thwak, thwak, thwak_. “That’s _Ms_. Impatient to you, here for my paperwork. Merc stuff. Sign me the fuck up.”

“You’re in the wrong place, honey _,_ ” the batarian said, using the dreaded pet name again. He pointed to a side entrance, past the vorcha with the chained-up varren. “Strippers’ quarters are that way.” The turian moved around Shepard and Miranda in slow, methodical circles.

“Alright, you know what?” Shepard said, her voice rising with anger. She _clicked_ off the safety on her pistol and pointed it at the merc’s head. “How about I just **shoot you** and take over the job of taking names, since you’re having such a shit-ass time with it it?”

Screams rang out, dancers getting up from their seats as they rushed to the main floor. The varren howled, his vorcha handler shrieking. Very quickly—but also casually—the turian circling them pulled out his own assault rifle. HisKassa Heavy made a metallic _vinng_ as he activated the firing mechanism.

The batarian held up his hands, taking one wavering step backwards. His expression remained neutral. Shepard didn’t drop her gun.

“Listen honey –”

“Ain’t your _honey_ , fucknut. You may be shooting blanks but rest assured I am **not**.”

“Shepard, I swear to _god_!” Miranda hissed under her breath. “We just got out of a firefight!”

One hand on her pistol, the other free, Miranda searched through her pocket for something: a container of pills? Meds? Shepard prayed this whole thing was going on the woman’s report to the Illusive Man. Let him squirm over how many credits he’d wasted on her busted corpse. She was going to Cone-of-Shame this stuff to the bloody end.

“What have you got there?” the batarian demanded, squinting at Miranda and her little white bottle.

“An occupational hazard,” she deadpanned, downing a couple of benzos. As she did the barefaced turian stepped into Shepard’s personal sphere, shadowing her body with his as he tilted his head to eye her. His gun was raised casually in the air, his weight balanced on one leg.

“What did she say your name was?” he asked. His tone was suggestive. There was a glint of something in his eyes. Recognition? _Shit_.

Shepard didn’t look at him directly, but her hand clenched around her pistol, still pointed at the batarian’s head. Too close. The turian was **too close** , his mandibles inches from her temple. She could feel the dry warmth of his breath on her face.

“Don’t have one,” she said tightly, and she was having a hard time keeping her thoughts in order. There were specks of color on the wall, and she wasn’t sure if they were real or if she was imagining them; flashes of a kaleidoscope, neon pinpricks.

The turian’s mandibles flared in a huff of breath. He laughed.

“You’ve got _something_ ,” he murmured. His free hand came up, delicately brushing away a strand of red hair. “You look like that doll in the posters.”

Shepard reached up and promptly snapped his wrist.

Black spots. There were black spots in her vision, the sound of breaking ribs. Flames on the sides of her face, she was so angry. Her hands were coated in blue.

The turian roared, staggering back. Eezo-laced fingers still wrapped around his broken arm, Shepard took her pistol and slammed the butt of it into the soft underside of his jaw. The turian went down. Break him. **Break him**. Blood was gurgling in his throat as the merc tried to breathe, his good hand reaching for her ankle. Shepard shot it, the incendiary bullet blowing away talons and bones in an explosion of pink muscles. Her used heat sink clackedto the floor. The turian shrieked.

The batarian reached for his gun even as Shepard turned hers on him.

“Did you wanna fuck me too?” she asked, her voice trembling with rage. “Or are we finally gonna get down to business?”

The batarian kept his hands in the air. The turian was still shrieking on the ground.

“Business,” the batarian choked out. The varren was yowling.

“ _Good_ ,” Shepard said. She pulled back the release on her pistol with a _hiss_ , recharging the clip. “Now either you sign me the fuck up and point my gun at Archangel, or I’ll start on you next.”

The merc quickly typed her name into the datapad.

* * *

 

They were going in hot.

The route to Garrus was a roundabout one, and not by choice. Down seventeen levels into Omega’s underbelly, past the main merchant quadrant and still-working refineries into an area where chaos was king.

Aria barely bothered to administer it, and the triads held little sway. First they took a hovercar to the lowest levels on the docks, then a rapid-response elevator that transported them along an abandoned mine shaft where the wind whistled like the shriek of a reaper’s vocals. The further down they went the louder the reverberating _twang_ of the metal cords became. The tip of Omega was suspended to its main dome by cables that were as thick as the _Normandy._

Archangel’s hideout was on the other side of the Quarantine Zone: the salarian Mordin Solus was parked at a base in between Points A and B. In order to avoid infection the triads had set up an easy access tunnel using an old sanitation duct beneath it, but that duct was currently clogged by a busted mech and the corpse of a drunken Eclipse soldier: he had thought it was a good idea to fire off one of his rockets in a confined space. Shepard’s team was weaving through the no-fly zone in order to get to Garrus faster. They weren’t stopping for anything other than Mordin, and Shepard had made sure of that. Anyone who disagreed with her was faced the hot end of her pistol. She’d already shot another Blue Suns merc for the Cardinal Sin of telling them to _wait_ while the tunnel was cleared.

The industrial-sized elevator made a _clunk_ as they finally landed in the residential section just before they reached the F.O.B. When it did, the grated metal door slid open with a _screech_. They’d run into little resistance as they’d travelled down the mine shaft, but Kasumi had radioed back to warn them that the entire place was crawling with vultures. Freelance human mercs mostly, along with copious amounts of vorcha who hadn’t joined the fight against Archangel. The two groups were picking over abandoned apartments and the scraps of corpses strewn across the halls.

Shepard and Zaeed led the vanguard. Miranda was on their flank and Jacob was bringing up the rear. Between the five of them they were carrying enough firepower to take out a geth tank. Shepard had even managed to bring along the RPG, but only because she’d given it to Zaeed to carry. He’d called her a darling and declared her the daughter he’d never had. The two of them were getting along beautifully.

Up ahead there was a crackling _whirr_ and a flash of orange light, followed by a gurgle. Then silence.

“All clear!” Kasumi called out. Shepard waved the team forward, pistol at the ready and back hunched. It was easier to think when she was moving towards a goal. The choking sensation wasn’t so bad at the moment, but she still didn’t have her helmet on and she knew that she should. _Not yet_ , she told herself. Every _hiss_ of air through the vents made her twitch with memories of the final attack.

Dim yellow lights flickered along the ceiling as the team made their way deeper into the cordoned-off area, armoured feet splashing through greasy puddles. Kasumi stood in the middle of the corridor, her hood shadowing her tattooed face as she turned to them. There was a dead human merc at her feet, his throat slit, blood spilling across the ground in a splatter of crimson. Shepard barely glanced at him. Meat was meat.

“Another human?” Jacob asked in surprise: it was all they had run into on the streets except for the vorcha and their fucking varren. Kasumi shrugged, seemingly unconcerned, then gave Shepard a set of updated coordinates and turned down a tunnel marked with a flashing green light. Her stealth shield crackled as she disappeared into the wall once more. A few seconds later the rest of the assault team followed.

All was silent for a bit. Shepard heard the _vrum, vrum_ of the fans and the _hum_ of the life support systems, but otherwise there was nothing. Six doors to the left, all apartments, three of them broken in. The right was a solid reddish-brown wall with questionable stains splattered across it. On the ground was the body of a batarian dressed in an orange jumpsuit next to a collection of used food containers. The air smelt strange, like antiseptic and bleach. Shepard stepped over the corpse and kept walking. The silence made her own heartbeat sound stronger.

“You ever fought with these people before?” Zaeed asked in an overly loud whisper. Shepard shrugged as they traversed a set of stairs without incident. There was a tense, coiling feeling in her gut that she always got before a firefight where the odds were against her. She was beginning to regret not putting on her helmet earlier: if she died before she got to Garrus she would never forgive herself.

“Jacob and Miranda,” she supplied, speaking low. “They’re good.” Miranda had given her some stims to calm her down after the fight with the merc in Afterlife. Stims only lasted so long however, and already she could feel the effects wearing off. The more active she was, the faster they faded. The anxiety was the worst.

“How much heat can they bring?” Zaeed asked.

As the merc spoke Jacob reached the top of the stairs. When he heard Zaeed’s words he gave the older man a _look_. Shepard knew **why** Zaeed was asking: he wanted to know if the two of them were willing to fight dirty and hard like enforcers. She kept her expression blank, hastily loading incendiary mods into her pistol and checking her others weapons before they went around the bend and hit trouble.

“They’re Cerberus,” she said. Shepard wasn’t a fan of Cerberus, but they were a far cry from the Alliance military and everyone this side of the Terminus knew that they packed a punch. She was pretty sure the Illusive Man personally vetted his special ops.

Suddenly there was an eerie chittering up ahead; something that sounded like a _screech_ but not necessarily from a vorcha. A crazed shiver went up her spine as her body instinctively remembered the metallic call. Shepard remembered the husks limping forward on Eden Prime, moving like broken crabs: the feeling of ice cold fingers digging into her skin and mouths full of wires opening to impossible sizes. With shaking hands—barely aware of the action—she reached for her belt and put another incendiary mod on her pistol, snapping it to the top of the barrel. Husks, husks. Fucking **husks** , and still no Garrus. She’d shot Sovereign to shit and the dead god was still chasing her. Oh fuck, they’d invaded the station –

“Shepard,” someone was saying. “Shepard?”

It took Shepard a moment to realize that Miranda was standing next to her. The Cerberus woman had her hand on her shoulder, her expression fairly blank but her eyes clearly worried. The team had come to a standstill.

Shepard looked down at the gun in her hands and saw that her hands were shaking. She felt a bit feverish. Flames on the sides of her face. Her face was melting, ribs breaking. Her ears were gone. How much time had passed?

Shepard was about to ask when they heard it again: another cry, louder this time, and more than one. Definitely vorcha. There was no metallic shriek. Shepard shook herself, telling herself that she’d imagined it. _Get a hold of yourself._ _Find Garrus._

“Cover me,” she said, and she hated how her voice came out as a croak. Zaeed did. Jacob took their six.

“Kasumi,” Shepard said through her headset as they stalked forward in formation, low to the ground. Shepard **definitely** regretted not wearing her helmet now, but she didn’t want to admit it. “Anything?”

“Vorcha,” Kasumi said into the headset. Shepard felt her shoulders sink with relief. No reapers at least. _Thank the gods for small mercies._

“Hostile?”

“Definitely.” The assassin’s words were a dry laugh. “Just killed some civilians. Over forty of them milling around in the landing. Should we bypass?”

“Negative,” Shepard said into her headset, readying her clip. “Will take too long. Do me a favor and cut the power breakers so they can’t use the lifts or call in reinforcements.”

“Will do,” Kasumi said, then her own comm went dead as she went into stealth mode. Behind them Miranda radioed back to the _Normandy_ to tell them they would be a bit late. Another vorcha screech sounded, followed by the baying of varren. The snake-dogs had caught their scent.

“Zaeed, grab that RPG,” Shepard whispered. They were in a bad position. Low ground, coming up to a grated set of stairs with giant piles of metal tubing resting across the top that blocked the landing from view. It gave their enemy cover. Catwalks lined a cavernous space on the other side. Shepard could see the pink, gangly form of a vorcha wandering along it.

There was the _thunk_ and _voom_ of a lift powering down. The lights flickered, then switched to backup as the main breakers were severed. A frantic _scritching_ began, heavy claws scrabbling against the floor.

“When I crest the rise, fire that thing,” Shepard hissed to Zaeed, nodding to the RPG. Zaeed nodded in return, adjusting it on his shoulder and taking up position towards the rear. Shepard disengaged the safety on her gun. Less than a second later the head of the first varren crested the top of the metal tubes, three more swinging out around it as they barrelled down the stairs with long, loping strides. The alpha howled, landing back onto the floor with a running _thud_ , the spines on his back swaying.

“TAKE ‘EM OUT IF THEY GET PAST ME!” Shepard yelled. Jacob raised his gun. He fired once, incendiary bullets ripping through flesh in a quick _ratta-tat-tat_ of burning metal. One of the varren _yipped_ and went down, skidding across the floor in a giant red smear. The vorcha on the catwalk turned towards them, snarling. A _boom_ sounded as biotics ignited, both hers and Miranda’s. The vorcha fired.

Shepard ducked.

There was a pattern to fighting. A breathing motion, in and out. One second and she was up the stairs in a surge of vanguard blue, her balled fist sending six varren flying as she slid across the floor to avoid a spray of bullets from the nearest vorcha. Shepard grabbed a passing dog by the mouth and snapped off its tusk; springing back to her feet at the end of the slide before slamming the giant fang straight through the neck of its alien handler.

Two seconds: a repetitive dance that felt off because there was no _twang_ of a sniper rifle. Hand still on the tooth, Shepard turned the body with her own momentum, using it as a shield as she whipped out her pistol and fired three headshots into the next closest vorcha. She jerked to her right and fired a fourth to take out a merc coming up on her flank, hidden behind a pillar. The bullet clipped the vorcha’s neck and he went down.

Three seconds. Five dead, not including the varren. Thirty-five to go. Kasumi was appearing in a crackle of orange along the catwalk, omni-blade slashing like a flutter of silk. Thirty-four. Thirty- _three_ as Jacob fired his assault rifle, peppering a charging vorcha with incendiary bullets that blew out his ribs in the process.

Four seconds. Breathing in, then out. A dance, but her steps were _off_ and Shepard was feeling more than a little ill. She heard a _va_ ** _king_** sound; the baritone _ping_ of a rocket being launched from it’s casing. Shepard ducked behind a crate with the tooth-corpse in tow just as the missile struck the ground where she’d been standing. Dust flew up, scattering frag and tiles. Her ears rang, white noise and splotches of color dancing around her.

Shepard covered her uncovered head, the body she was using as a shield losing an arm in the explosion. There was a sudden burning sensation as something slashed across her cheek. She cried out, then cursed.

Miranda’s biotics hummedas she threw two more vorcha against the wall. Shepard ducked out from behind the frag-peppered container and charged deeper into the scrum, Eezo crackling around her like a Mass Effect relay. Zaeed fired his RPG, the missile streaking past. Then there was blankness. Flashes of color and too-bright lights. A vorcha rushed her. Just before Shepard shoved her fist through it’s chest the visage flickered, like a glitching image from the Prothean beacon.

She saw a husk.

Before she could stop herself her hand went through it with her own momentum, meeting nothing but wires. The creature’s mouth opened. It screamed like a reaper, fingers clawing at her face.

Shepard cried out and flailed backwards, hitting the ground hard. The husk fell on top of her, it’s teeth at her throat. Cobalt energy surged around her, shorting out shields and burning skin.

“SHEPARD!” someone was saying, and it was the vorcha again. She was pushing it off. Shepard stood, then stumbled, her ears ringing and back hunched as another rocket sailed past. Her gun was in her hand, the heat sink burning. “SHEPARD, COME BACK!”

She bowled straight into a group of vorcha, sending them spinning like pins. The dance. The dance was off. There was no Garrus. She couldn’t breathe. Gasping –

_“SHEPARD!”_

Shepard blinked. She woke up. Around her there was silence. The crackle of fire. A wetness on her hands was dripping down to the floor in a steady pattern. She tried to move her legs and found that she couldn’t; they were buoyed by bodies, vorcha and dead varren piled around her in a tangle of limbs. Miranda was snapping he fingers in front of her face.

“Shepard, are you with me?” the woman demanded. Shepard shuddered and blinked, her senses returning. Had she killed them all? Must have, but she didn’t feel so well. Why were people staring at her strangely? How long had she been out?

Trying to act nonchalantly, Shepard expelled her used heat sink, reaching for her belt and slapping in another. The room was partially caved in, scorched by rocket fire. The catwalk was hanging at an awkward angle. Maybe if she pretended that she could remember what had happened, the others wouldn’t notice.

“What are you talking about?” she said, her tone neutral. She turned to Miranda and smiled blandly. “Of course I’m with you.”

Zaeed snorted in disbelief and spat, re-shouldering the RPG. The pale blue light flickered over the entrance into the clinic like a beacon. They kept going.

* * *

 

Mordin Solus was tall for a salarian. Most aliens were rather tall in comparison to her measly five-foot-three, but for some reason—this time—Shepard found it especially aggravating. Maybe it was because she had to crane her neck to eye him, and one could not do a lot of “interrogation and intimidation” when they were the one doing the craning. Even Miranda was taller than her with her fucking heels, and Shepard’s hands felt _tingly_. Her limbs were getting jittery as the stims began to wear off. She told herself that was all it was.

Deep coral skin with a white underbelly and a missing horn greeted her: big black eyes and sharply cut white robes that definitely reminded her of a doctor, although maybe not one from the Citadel. Mordin’s face was lined with age. He was old for a Salarian, and spoke with a quick, upbeat gait that at any other time Shepard would have found charming. Unfortunately he tended to ramble. A lot.

“Mordin Solus?” she asked, standing in between hospital beds. Cots were lining the far wall and a six-bladed fan thrummed overhead, the ceiling lights vibrating behind the blades in a soft, flickering yellow. Tangerine omni-screens were spread out in front of the scientist, beeping quietly as they processed data. The windows were boarded up with metal grates to protect from gunfire. Another salarian was lying in an emergency cot to the left, coughing into a ventilator; a human nurse leaned over him, administering a sedative with a _shush_.

Down the hall behind them, a turian vomited. Another human nurse in a tight-fitting blue and white jumpsuit quickly hurried over to him, lowering the taller alien back onto his bed.

“Here sir, that’s it,” the nurse said, helping to lift his long legs onto the cot. She tucked a blanket around him.

“Where’s my daughter?” the turian asked. His voice was raspy.

Mordin scanned Shepard before he did anything else, then gave her a very strange look. He scanned the others as well. “Hmm. Don’t recognize you,” he said. “Too well armed to be refugees. No mercenary uniforms. Quarantine still in effect. Here for something else. Vorcha? Crew to clean them up? Unlikely.”

“Oh, they’re cleaned up.” Shepard quipped, stepping to the side to allow the nurse to rush past to assist a batarian who was leaning over the rim of a fountain, gasping. “The walls aren’t, though. You’ll need an industrial scrub brush to get the stains out. Look, doctor –”

Mordin circled her like she was a bug under the microscope. Shepard twitched and prayed for patience. She had to bite down on her tongue and clench her hands against her thighs in order not to reach for her gun. Garrus. Garrus. Fuck, Garrus was **alone**. What if he was hurt while they were standing here talking? She’d kill him.

“The plague,” Mordin continued, speaking rapidly. His horns all but trembled with excitement, pupils dilating as he processed information. “All humans here, not affected by it. Investigating the possible use as a bioweapon? No, no, no, too many guns.”

“One can never have too many guns,” Zaeed supplied, ever affable-yet-ornery. Shepard latched on to something else.

“Humans aren’t affected by the plague?” she asked. She tried not to look at the turian in the hall: he was talking about the Spirits now, rambling on about what was probably his long-dead daughter. Mordin shook his head.

“Humans immune. Have not discovered reasons yet. Working on a cure for the others.”

Immediately Shepard’s one-track mind narrowed down to a single-celled organism, her thoughts flying to her missing six. She thought of the turian coughing his lungs out in the hall, blue blood on his lips. Gasping. Her hands were shaking. _Christ, Garrus._

“Right,” she said, trying to keep the tremble in her voice to a minimum. She introducing herself to the salarian with a quick, somewhat-stilted handshake, then gestured towards the exit. Her ribs felt so tight. “You’re hired, I’m hired, my employer is waiting, let’s go. Mission time.”

“Mission?” Mordin asked. “What mission?” Then he was shaking his head, very rapidly and in the negative. He wasn’t leaving. “No, no, no, too busy, clinic understaffed. Plague spreading too fast. Who sent you?”

Shepard counted backwards from ten. Flames. Flames on the side of her face. Her ribs felt broken.

“Shepard,” Miranda warned, but it was too late.

“Alright, _listen here_ you giant salamander.”

The Cerberus woman grimaced and dug into her pocket for her pill bottle.

* * *

 

By the time they reached the loading zone to Archangel’s hideout with Mordin in tow—more than a hundred dead vorcha later—Shepard’s stims had fully worn off, leaving her nerves on edge and her mind in tatters. Her brow was beaded with sweat, her complexion peaky; she was breathing too heavy and the lights in the hallway seemed too bright. The had filched a hovercar from the abandoned Quarantine Zone in order to cut the distance in half. When EDI informed them that there was no other way to Archangel except through the mercs, Shepard grew angrier.

Miranda had to drive she was so upset, spending the entire ride obsessively unloading and reloading her gun with incendiary clips. By the time they arrived Shepard’s jaw was clenched so hard her bottom lip was bleeding, her cheeks an ugly white with the strain. They landed the cherry-red vehicle out in the open, just beyond a triple set of slate grey stairs overlooking an open boulevard directly over one of Omega’s infamous chasms. Shepard stormed out of the car, back hunched and seeing double. Eezo flickered along her knuckles as she struggled to contain her rage. Garrus. Garrus. Where was Garrus?

A batarian met them, thankfully more professional than the last Blue Sun that had propositioned her. As they emerged from the vehicle he waved them over, heavily armed with his assault weapon held at the ready. As their feet hit the pavement—the car doors sliding shut behind them with a _shing_ —gunfire rang out from across the boulevard. Behind the batarian there was a long open corridor, its ceiling soaring up to at least fifty feet. Neon lemon signs hung from boarded-up shops along the walkway, wires and cables suspended from the rusted brown ceiling. Geometric pillars with rectangular white lights lined either side of the stairs, giving off a soft white glow. They were humming loudly.

“It’s about time they sent me someone who looks like they can fight,” the batarian spat, his four hairless brows pinched together with exhaustion. His pale green skin was speckled with red. Shepard approached him, pale and silent, her black-gloved fingers clenched tight around the grip of her pistol. The ground was swaying beneath her feet and her chest felt compressed. Beside her Zaeed swaggered up to the Blue Sun before gripping him by the elbow with one hand and slapping him against the back with the other. The batarian smiled grimly and copied the movement in turn.

“Good to see you, mate,” Zaeed said. He seemed like he knew him.

“Likewise. Nice to finally have a professional onboard.” Then, when Zaeed thumbed his hand in the direction of Shepard and eyeballed her as their leader, he added: “They tell you what we’re up against?”

Shepard’s response was deadpanned.

“Cannon fodder.”

To her credit Miranda managed to keep her expression neutral, but Shepard could hear her coughing through the alarm. There was a flashing orange sign to the left of them in the form of an asari pictograph, advertising the district: _Ward 83C_.

“Ha!” said the batarian over the rattle of gunfire, gesturing towards the noise. It led out into an open space hazed over by Omega’s murky red atmosphere. The _KRAK_ of a sniper rifle echoed off the pillars of the landing bay. “Archangel’s holed up in a building at the end of the boulevard. He’s got a superior position and the only way in is over a very exposed bridge. It’s a killing ground.”

“One can hope,” Shepard hummed, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. She switched the safety off on her pistol and began to methodically load an additional clip into her gun with a cold expression, emotionless except for the beading sweat along her temple.

The merc looked away from the barricades that he was pointing at towards her. His eyes narrowed.

“What was that?” he said.

Miranda cleared her throat in warning: strike one-thousand by now, probably.

“Nothing,” Shepard said, pushing the clip into place with a final _clack_. Her nerves were fried, but it was the most focused she’d felt in ages. She was so close to her goal. “You got a plan?” she asked.

“A small team is waiting to infiltrate the hideout, but we need to draw Archangel’s fire so they can move in. He collapsed all the underground passageways and sealed the doors to the lower levels. We’ve got teams digging, but it’s taking too long. If we can get the gunship flying again that’ll help.” The batarian turned his head and nodded in the direction of the walkway again. “The bridge is the only way to his hideout, so you’ll head straight over that and keep Archangel busy.”

Shepard paused in the motion of checking her gun barrel. Inside her chest and beneath her breastplate, something brittle seemed to snap.

“You used a gunship on him?” she asked. Before Miranda could steer things away from the cliff with an artfully-worded question, the batarian was responding.

“Yeah, Tarak’s, but Archangel shot it. He knew just where to hit it. But he’s getting tired, making mistakes. We’ll have him soon enough.”

“What did you say your name was?” Shepard asked, sliding the barrel of her pistol back into place. A blue light hummed to life on the side: the go signal.

“I **didn’t** , but it’s _Salkie_ ,” the batarian replied. He was starting to watch the movement of her hands with a serious frown, but waved her towards the catwalk regardless. “You can head up to the boulevard and get to the third barricade. Talk to Sergeant Cathka. He’ll tell you when to go in.”

“Salkie,” Shepard said, nodding once. “Right.” Her own blood from the rocket’s frag was drying across her face like a smeared version of Garrus’ colony tattooes. “Thanks for the tip.”

She raised her pistol and shot the batarian point blank in the forehead.

* * *

 

When no mercs came running—the sound of Shepard’s pistol and Miranda’s high curse lost to the constant _ratta-tat-tat_ from the bridge—they continued power-walking towards the boulevard, driven by Shepard’s feverish pace. They managed to disable a few mechs before running into Tarak, leader of the Blue Suns on Omega and owner of the gunship. Shepard nearly killed him on the spot. The only thing that stopped her was Miranda casually pretending to lean against her shoulder, gripping it hard. Zaeed also seemed to know him.

“Tarak, you old fuck!” Zaeed crowed. The two of them shook hands, hugging tight: it was through this that Shepard found out that Tarak was unusually talkative for a deadman.

“It’s Archangel!” Tarak spat as he ranted to the merc about his quarry, his jowls wobbling beneath his chin. Shepard simply stood there, small and pale and trembling in her armor as she imagined all the ways he’d squeal like a pig when she finally plucked out his eyes with her bare fingers. How his skin would cling to muscle and bone as she ripped it away with her bare teeth, his blood on her lips.

She imagined herself kissing Garrus, Tarak’s blood mingling between them like a trophy. The image was instantly burned into her brain like a Prothean beacon. It wouldn’t leave her. The ground swayed beneath her feet as she reeled with thirst.

_My arm. My arm is gone._

_Where’s Garrus?_

“Something wrong with your girlie?” Tarak asked as Shepard wobbled visibly. Zaeed had to reach out to catch her, but he did it naturally, laughing loud and slapping her bodily across her back.

“My protege-in-training?” he said, and it was a good cover. “No. Just drank too much last night. Thought she could beat an old dog like me at _King’s Cup!”_

There **would** be something wrong if they didn’t get moving. _KRAK_ went a sniper rifle, and there was the _ping-ping-pang_ of automatic machine gun fire in return. Shepard was plucking at a non-existence band around her wrist, metal fingers scraping against her armor.

Suddenly the team was walking forward, but she didn’t know how or when they’d started. There was a blank space in her memory.

“Shepard,” Miranda whispered, leaning close to her ear as they continued towards Cathka. Shepard’s steps were short and quick, her eyes watering as she tried to regulate her breathing, but it was coming in gasps. “Shepard?”

 _In, out. Breathe Shep,_ a familiar voice murmured through her memories, but Shepard was choking. Every bullet was one more second between them, and the seconds were adding up to an eternity of lead. She wanted to present Tarak’s head to him like a gift.

“Shepard, are you with me?”

“ _Yes_.” It came out like a whimper. What was wrong with her? Her brain felt broken. Maybe it was the nerves. Fucking Cerberus had woken her up too soon and hadn’t fixed her right.

Trying to keep the action as nonchalant as possible, Miranda took out some strange pills from her never-ending pocket and handed them to her. Shepard swallowed mindlessly, Miranda’s other hand a comforting weight against the small of her back. The woman kept her expression utterly neutral, betraying nothing, but the way she touched her screamed _worry_.

“We got problems?” Jacob said as he came up on the other side of Miranda. They were getting closer and closer to the barricade, and Shepard was all but jumping off the walls in agitation. The meds were **not** kicking in, and in a moment of desperation she wondered if they were even real. Placebos, maybe? She wouldn’t put it past the other woman.

“Nothing,” Miranda assured him, her expression calm but cold. Her voice was confident but she had no reason to be. “Just some of us got less sleep than others. We’ll be fine.”

As they passed by an additional barricade there was a _KRAK_. A human merc along the top of the wall fell back in an explosion of pink brain matter, body slumping over his turret before he hit the floor. Shepard walked faster.

Then:

“Move! Move! Move!” shouted a Blue Suns merc. Freelancers that had been milling around the area began funneling towards the bridge.

“Fuck this.” Shepard broke into a run.

“Shepard,” Miranda said, her voice rising, but Shepard kept running. “Shepard, **wait**!”

“I’m sensing a pattern!” Zaeed quipped, and Shepard hear the _click_ of Miranda grimly loading her own weapon. There was another _KRAK_ , then a boom as something explosive was hit. Smoke began rising into the air.

“Stress!” Mordin supplied as he trailed behind them, his chipper tone akin to a scientist who’d just discovered a new species of mushroom. “Makes humans act irrationally. Sometimes violently. Hormonal response brought on by grief. In other species effect can be amplified due to more rigid genetic patterns, most notably turians. Responsible in part for Shanxi escalation and impending actions by both sides! Studies show that one in three post-traumatic stress cases in both species were consistent with –”

“NOT NOW!” Miranda yelled. Shepard was taking a running leap at the barrier and scrambling over it with the rest of the mercs. She landed down on the other side with an _oomph_ , knees buckling.

“SHEPARD, WAIT!”

She didn’t.

There was the _ping_ of a grenade launcher from the merc beside her; the returning _KRAK_ of a sniper rifle and the man next to her went down, his arm blown away with the force. Shepard had time to register the chasm beneath the bridge. In the distance she could see the cables of Omega’s underground and directly in front of her was a tan-hued building, two stories high with a single entrance at the bottom. The lower levels of the building spiralled off into oblivion, disappearing amongst red-lit haze.

Then Shepard was running.

She was dashing across the bridge, cement dust kicking up beside her from the spray of fragmenting bullets, pistol in her hand as she ducked down, her heart in her throat and her eyes hard as she moved as fast as she could. Faster, faster, she had to go _faster_. Archangel could kill her.

 _KRAKOW!_ There was the thunderous clap of a high-powered sniper rifle. The merc ahead of her went down in a spray of red, his head gone from the shoulders up. Shepard kept going. Nearby Mordin ducked behind a crate to avoid being hit. It shuddered as an incendiary round struck the front of it, narrowly missing his leg.

“THOUGHT HE WAS ONE OF YOURS!” the salarian said. Another round went off. It was terrifying to be on the receiving end of Garrus’ sniper rifle. She never wanted to again.

“HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE!” Jacob replied. Shepard ignored them. A bit farther down the bridge, a merc’s leg exploded. He screamed and fell, wriggling like a worm. Shepard grit her teeth and dashed back out from under cover as Archangel reloaded. Her team followed.

 _KRAK!_ She felt it before she heard it; a bone-breaking _thud_ directly into her shoulder. Shepard cried out, her head rattling in her helmet and her whole body swaying backwards, but she didn’t fall. She thought she could hear a reaper’s shriek in her ears, but there were no reapers here. Not yet.

“SHEPARD!” Miranda shouted as another cloud of debris was violently thrown from the catwalk. Behind them a mech _whirred_ and shut down as Archangel punched an explosive round straight through the canopy, the bridge shaking with teeth-rattling thuds as its legs pinwheeled to the side with a squealing of air brakes. Shepard could definitely hear a reaper’s shriek now, and suddenly she was back on the Citadel. She was dodging lightning and firing frantically as Sovereign flung Saren’s corpse at her like a homicidal puppet.

She didn’t check to see if she was bleeding or if the concussive shot had gone through her armour. Shepard kept running, heartbeat thundering in her ears as it intermingled with the ghostly screams of her past. The end of the bridge was coming up in front of her, fifteen paces away. She was almost out of the sniper’s range. A few more steps and she would make it.

Three more steps, almost there. Machine gun fire sounded from the bridge, followed by another _KRAK_ , two of them in quick succession. Something exploded behind them on the catwalk. Shepard’s metal-clad feet thumped against the grating as she finally came under the awning, rushing into the building’s lower level. Miranda and Mordin came up behind her, followed by Jacob and a now-visible Kasumi. Zaeed was in the rear.

There were bodies everywhere. Asasi and batarians and salarians, slumped over chairs and couches and splayed out against walls, their bodies riddled with bullet holes. Their different colored blood was intermingling into a muddy brown oozeon the floor. Tan pillars to her left and right, and ahead of them a set of stairs. Using Eezo to make herself run faster, Shepard felt the cobalt _boom_ of biotics flare to prominence as she used it to propel herself up and over a long, low table; sliding along it with gun in hand before she slipped off the other side and kept running. _Garrus, Garrus, Garrus_.

She was almost there.

“Shepard, slow down!” Miranda said, then “Jacob! Check her six!”

Shepard was already on the steps, feet splashing through puddles of bright red blood as she stepped over the corpse of a Blue Sun merc and made her way to the crows’ nest. There was a door at the top, barricaded and shut: three mercs were trying to get in.

Shepard ripped the head clean off the closest one with a surge of Eezo and shot the second, then bodychecked the third, turning him into nothing more than a blue smear on the wall. Once she got to the door she tried to bypass the code, but it didn’t work. She almost shot it to shit, then remembered that it might have been rigged with explosives. _Oh fuck._ ** _Garrus_** _._

“MORDIN!” she yelled, ditching her used heat sink with a _hiss_ from the pistol’s chamber, slapping in another. A few seconds later the salarian was beside her, his big black eyes blinking rapidly and spindly body swaying as another _boom_ shook the building: someone was launching rockets. Zaeed’s gun was pointed in the direction they’d come from; several shots rang out, followed by the shout of a merc. He fired back. Their cover was blown.

“Must move out of the way!” Mordin shouted. Shepard stepped to the side, teeth chattering with adrenalin and Eezo spiking out of control as she gripped her gun and all but turned around in circles, lost as to what to do with herself. Mordin crouched low, omni-tool activated; his slim alien fingers swiped sideways across the device then quickly typed in a code, only to be met with a _beep_. Shepard heard the next _KRAKOW_ of the sniper rifle, and was suddenly struck by the horrifying realization that Garrus might try to off himself if he thought he was done for. He would go down guns blazing. She knew he would. Oh god. Oh _god_ , _fuck, fuck, fuck –_

“Hurry,” she gasped. Mordin _humphed_ as he was met with another angry _beep_. “Doc, hurry!”

“Fidget if you must Shepard!” he shouted, and he was met with a third _beep_. “But fidget in the corner! I must **concentrate**!”

Another _KRAK._ Shepard felt like she was going to puke in panic. There were black spots in her memory. The big blue of Alchera rising up to meet her, skin bubbling beneath her visor. She had no lips or nose left, the flesh melted away.

_Breathe, Shep. In, out._

Another _beep_ , this time in the positive. Mordin gave off a triumphant shout.

“Got it!” he declared, the door sliding open. Before it was even finished peeling back Shepard was slipping inside. Tan tiles met her feet; tan pillars around her, three walls with open windows looking down on the bridge from above. Guns and ammo were scattered across the floor, used heat sinks piling up in strategic corners. Omega’s crimson lighting cast everything in an otherworldly glow.

She heard the clink of a sniper rifle reloading before she even saw him; the _shing,_ then the _VOOM_ of the weapon going off, followed by the hiss of the incendiary heat sink clackingto the floor next to the others. There was a figure perched by a crow’s nest just ahead, dressed head-to-toe in dark blue body armor. _Masculine_ she quickly deduced, from the width of his shoulders, but very angular with a wiry, slender build. The sniper’s helmet soared behind the back of his head in a sail, the armored spurs on either of his legs sticking out like foot-long blades. A turian, Shepard knew instantly. Professional killer, from the way that he moved. Very quick.

Shepard’s heart lodged in her throat. There was another _KRAK_. Another scream from the bridge.

“Archangel?” she said, rushing forward. The sniper didn’t respond to that. Without missing a beat an armored hand pulled back the release on a massive, six-foot long sniper rifle, extending another still-smoking heat sink into a pile on the floor. The motion was steady, if a bit slow; the three-fingered hand sporting a chrome-colored glove wrapped tight around a narrow wrist, specifically designed for holding long-distance rifles. The shoulder that the gun was balanced on was more heavily armored as well. His helmet was covered by an even darker blue hood.

Shepard was already re-holstering her Harpy. She was clawing at the latches on the bottom of her helmet, trying to get them undone. Breathe. She couldn’t breathe. “Garrus?!” she said, rushing towards him. He stopped at that.

“Fuck!” Miranda said when Shepard rushed forward, then “Jacob, cover her! Mordin and Zaeed, out front! Kasumi cover the rear!”

“Roger!” Jacob said, walking in and moving towards the open wall to take up a position. Zaeed unshouldered the RPG.

The sniper turned towards Shepard. He was tall, even crouched, and when he started to stand it was a slow, staggering movement, punctured by gunfire from Jacob that he rained down onto the catwalk.

“Shepard?” a familiar voice asked, dull with shock and muffled by their helmet. The sniper had to use his own gun to prop himself up, left leg sagging a bit with exhaustion. His visor sparked, seeming to glitch.

“Garrus.” The latches on her helmet finally came free and Shepard ripped it off, gasping noisily as she dropped it to the ground and rushed towards him. She nearly knocked the turian over over when she slammed into his front.

More gunfire sounded: shouts from the bridge. Jacob and Zaeed fired back, followed shortly thereafter by Miranda. Shepard’s fingers scrabbled against his chestplate, her arm going around his narrow waist and hand to his back as she tried to keep him standing. “Garrus?!”

The sniper’s legs sagged violently; a heavily muscled arm came down hard along her shoulders, talons digging in and piercing the shell of her armor as he leaned his weight against her. His rifle dropped to the ground with a _clack._

“Shep?!” he asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, and just like that the turian’s legs gave way. He went down in a pile of armored limbs, gasping raggedly. Shepard’s arms were around his shoulders. She was hugging him like she was dying, her gloved hand pawing at the nape of his kevlar-covered neck as she blindly searched for skin over the rim of his armor. His strange blue hood was soft against her cheek, worn down and threaded with holes.

“Garrus,” she said, and she was sobbing. “Garrus, missed you.” She really **was** crying now, consumed by the reverberating tenor of his distinctive voice.

“ _Shep_.” The turian was frantically trying to pull off his own helmet. He got down to the face shield before Shepard was hugging him tighter, her forehead pressing to the side of his scaled temple with desperation. She couldn’t get close enough.

“Missed you,” she choked out. Another round of gunfire hit the pillar just above them, shattering stone and raining down fragments. There was a hand on the small of her back, running over it in a blind, frenzied manner before Shepard heard him violently rip off his chrome-colored glove. A bare, taloned hand threaded through her hair, the still-gloved hand pressing hard to her waist. A keening sound rose next to her ear as Garrus’ hooded forehead pressed feverishly to her temple, plates meeting skin.

“ _Spirits._ ** _Shep_** _.”_

“I’m sorry,” she said. The tension was leaving her in a wave, replaced with exhaustion. She was trying so not to cry and failing miserably: she could barely see through her tears. “I’m so **sorry**.”

Then she heard it, faint but getting closer: the whirring, unmistakable roar of a gunship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author’s Note**
> 
> Thanks to everyone for the kudos and bookmarks, and an additional thanks to those that commented! Always great getting feedback on the story.
> 
> **Intel**
> 
>   * The [**Blue Suns**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Blue_Suns) bill themselves as “private security organization” on paper, but in reality they’re one of the biggest merc names in the Skyllian Verge. Founded by Zaeed Massani and Vigo Santiago in 2160 CE, they would go on to become a highly successful and one of the most notorious mercenary companies in the Milky Way. One of their most recent contracts in the last few years was acquiring Commander Shepard’s corpse from Alchera at the request of the Shadow Broker, a plot foiled in part by Liara T’Soni and Aria T’Loak before Shepard’s body was turned over to Cerberus.
>   * Favored as cannon fodder frontmen by the Blood Pack for their bloodthirsty and near cockroach-like adaptability to any environ, **[Vorcha](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Vorcha) ** are a sentient (debatable) species from Heshtok. Seen as pests by most of the known galaxy, they hold the record as the shortest-lived sapient species with 20 years being the average lifespan.
> 



	4. The Revanchist

He died by his own hand.

This was one of the few things that Saren remembered in a plane of existence that was neither here nor there. He had died on his own volition, muzzle of the gun pressed to the side of his head. With a _click_ and a _bang_ everything flipped to black. Green eyes had been staring at him, bright and limpid.

There were Spirits and then there were _spirits_ , he learned later on, and later still he learned he was one of the latter. Granted no peace nor grand place of worship where one transcended: contrary to turian dogma, he would **not** be acting as a shield for still-living comrades. Such was the fate of the condemned.

By the time he realized his death had come and gone—stolen repeatedly many months prior—Saren had been wandering through the bellies of broken ships and whispering through Citadel corridors. Deep inside the empty, hollowed-out spaces that nobody knew of except for the Keepers, he lurked. These were the rooms where he laid his bones to rest, the graves that he made for himself when no one came looking. As it had been in life, his existence was solitary; partially by choice and the rest through consequence.

Transcendence. Synthesis. _If she does not bow, break her_ , the order had been, but breaking had seemed like such a waste. So he’d tried to bargain instead. Saren hated humans, but he knew useful when he saw it: a polished weapon for a steady hand.

_She’ll be useful_ , he’d told Sovereign, and deep down through the aching emptiness of time, an alien mind had awoken. An idea that was cold and methodical, sprung from a kernel of his desperation.

_Yes, she will be_ , It had decided, and amongst the nest of Elder Gods Harbinger’s voice had sung sour yellow notes, like the wails of the rachnai over Noveria.

Strange and small amongst the Gods who were so much larger, this insect called _Shepard_ , green-eyed and defiant. _Come and_ ** _take it_** _,_ she’d spat over the corpse of their vanguard, and Harbinger had chuckled. It could not feel emotions like Saren could—songs of muscle and skin and bones, the whispers of worthlessness—but it had been fond of her.

Was.

Still _is_.

_Bend her_ , It commanded, and in the last moments of his life Saren had tried.

_They’re bending_ ** _you_** _,_ she’d said, her gun raised and expression sad. The green of her eyes had been all the more vivid from the wounds that he’d given her. _Better to break first_.

Saren had respected her in that singular moment as a worthy adversary. In another life he would’ve taken Anderson’s pupil for his own out of spite.

_I’ve stolen your dreams and now your student,_ the idea went. In this alternate fate amongst the ether the woman stood beside him, cool and collected with a pistol pressed to Anderson’s head. She pulled the trigger. It felt sweet on Saren’s tongue, this fantasy of his: a phantom tongue that he no longer possessed, like phantom limbs and phantom talons that clenched with rage in the darkness.

The Room. He remembered he was going to take her to _The Room_ and show her the stars. Weapons were tools and tools should be used, but good ones needed caring for so he’d planned to upload her into the vastness of the space, free and wandering from Harbinger’s hunger.

But that’s what **Harbinger** wanted, another part of him had said. Another part of him saw it, the Elder God’s tentacles reaching forward like a covetous creature. The only person who still was a person by the time he’d died had been Shepard herself. She’d threatened to break her own body, playing brinkmanship with an angry overlord who held all the cards. At the very last moment Harbinger had blinked. Then, all was darkness.

_You did not bring her to me._

After that was The Pain.

All was not black. All was stolen, ripped from Saren’s corpse in retribution. Needles were weaved through skin, plates pulled from muscles like flower petals. _You did not bring her to me, you did not bring her to me_ , **_you did not bring her to me_** _._

The remembrance of this agony made him wail some days, ship consoles glitching. Lights flickered along the haunted spaces of the Citadel’s under-cities. It kept his thoughts focused.

Saren did not remember much of his old life, but he remembered Shanxi. He remembered his brother. He remembered the humans with their revolting, too-soft skin and ever-growing crests, their claws barely better than a hatchling’s. He remembered Shepard more than anything else. The visions of her that Harbinger sent him. A better puppet, It wanted. The Lovely Corpse. She would be it.

_“Help me,”_ Shepard would whisper, seeping into the spaces where Saren made his graves. Beyond the conduits he had created the _Dark Place_ : a world comprised entirely of ink and black matter _._ In the center of it he placed her on a pedestal, decorated in pain. Even in death Saren remembered the sensation of limbs. He could remember the presence of his phantom body and visualized hers, curled carefully in front of him.

Sometimes he would see her, small and pale with Reaper wires sprouting from her back. Blood would drip from her mouth and nose and eyes like a river.

_She’s me_ , he’d think, and Shepard was everything and nothing all at once. He hated humans.

_“Help me,”_ she’d say, reaching for him in fear. Saren would feel strange, too-many-fingered hands ghosting across his mandibles. The notes she sung were a sad, purple thing, like the bruises he’d left on her cheeks and ribs. Her eyes were so green he couldn’t stop staring.

“I cannot,” he’d reply, but sometimes he’d grab back, talons carefully wrapping around the thinness of her wrist. Saren appreciated Shepard more in the afterlife, he decided. It was a benefit, really, of thinking backwards.

* * *

 

The time directly after the failed invasion was one of banality.

It was not a _long_ time in mortal terms, but for Saren everything and nothing happened in seconds. Entire universes lived and died in the spaces between breaths. Nebulae exploded then re-stitched together. His own death replayed on an endless loop that drove him to madness.

Saren drifted in grief, but mostly in rage. By the time he realized he still possessed consciousness, several months had passed and Shepard had left. The Lovely Corpse was still alive because he could feel it in the way the air thrummed with energy. _Shepard, Shepard, Shepard_ , the voiceless would cry. His own phantom mandibles would sneer with distaste. Figureheads were doomed to fail and there were no gods here.

The world was strange when you didn’t have a body. Sights and sounds existed in ethereal signals inhabiting Eezo waves, made real as he infected cameras and environmental controls like a malevolent-yet-powerless monster. He was able to observe and listen to the spaces around him, but he could never _change_. The best Saren could do was travel through metal, making sparks fly and omni-tools malfunction. Beyond that the tangible world was unobtainable.

Broken beams lay everywhere after the failed invasion, the Presidium caved in. Sovereign’s arms were strew about like the rotting, dismembered pieces of multi-limbed corpses, taped off and cordoned on the urging of Shepard. _DO NOT TOUCH_ , the signs blared in the Standard Trade Language, and next to the warnings were pictures of her. Saren knew gods existed—he’d met them before—but he no longer prayed. The human woman was singularly the most vivid sensation he could remember, so he clung to her presence. She was a constant, steadying force for his anger.

Sometimes Shepard was alone in these clandestine, tabloid images. Other times an asari or a krogan joined the scrum. Occasionally a quarian did too. In each of the photos there was always a turian. Saren didn’t recognize him, but his colony markings screamed _Palaven_. Honor was a concept that he instinctively recalled, and even more important than the honor of your clan was that of your commander: the tribe you made for yourself.

_Attached_ , this turian was, and Saren could tell by the way that he stood too close. Every time he saw the two of them together he felt a flicker of disgust, followed by horror. His species was sickeningly predictable in which buttons to push. Harbinger would take one look at them and Shepard would wilt, like so many dead petals strewn across the Presidium Gardens. All the turian would be able to do was stand by and watch.

It was his fault.

_His fault_ , Saren decided, and he became obsessed with it: with this notion of imperfection. Perhaps it was because the figure in the tabloids was another turian like himself. He knew the sniper was one of Shepard’s squad, but whenever Saren wracked his brain to think of whom he could be, the name escaped him. The gun he was holding was in the wrong position, he decided. Shepard’s blind spots were open. The carelessness of the whole exchange made him seethe. It was not so much an obsession with the woman’s safety as it was with _usefulness_. Despite being her Lieutenant, the turian’s effectiveness seemed limited at best. As in life, Saren found himself continuously disappointed by underlings.

Always, he wandered.

The Citadel was a vast, towering monolith, gargantuan and ancient. Even in its damaged state one could look through viewports and watch as colossal arms extended and fanned out. The station flickered with light as it drifted through the Serpent Nebula, shades of violet mixed with bright tangerine. For the first several months the mood on the station was chaotic. Building-sized chunks of debris always floated past, making travel harrowing. Destroyed turian frigates and Alliance-class warships mostly, their wires tangled together like the seaweed beneath Palaven’s oceans. Sometimes Saren saw the bodies of crew members too, crusted over with ice.

When the inhabitants of the Citadel began to return—laying tributes at the feet of their fallen—he started to follow them. Eventually Saren tried to burrow his way into their minds as well. The first host he inhabited was a volus. Slithering sideways, he made his way into the mind of a merchant named _Bon Valam_ through the operating apparatus on the front of his pressure suit.

The world through the eyes of the volus was a very large place. Walking amongst aliens was like wandering through a sea of fast-moving trees, all brightly colored and flowing. Saren could not change his host to do his bidding, but he was able to listen. In close proximity to others, synthetic systems gave way to the spiritual. Almost immediately he could hear the alien’s deepest thoughts.

A good, upstanding citizen Bon Valam had been, albeit not perfect: prone to business dealings that got him in trouble. So long as he looked the other way and the finances kept flowing, he was able to sleep at night. Unfortunately that was then and this was _now_. Valam had not been resting well since destruction had hit the Citadel. His fine liqueur business had been crushed beneath Sovereign’s bulk.

The damage to the station was haphazard: some areas remained unscathed, while others were out of commission for months. For those that had been affected, emergency quarters were constructed in the station’s _Entrance and Immigration_ ward _, No. 46B_. That was where Valam slept at night: his rough human sheets a deep mustard yellow, his narrow cot too tall for his legs. He shared his room with six other aliens, none of whom required the same planetary pressure controls as himself. He’d complained about it to C-Sec, but they’d brushed off his report and told him to take a number.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said a C-Sec officer. Saren vividly remembered the encounter because the officer was human. A human **woman** who looked nothing like Shepard, but the Lovely Corpse was out of reach and some of Harbinger’s covetousness had rubbed off on him. He was thirsty. “We’re backlogged. A lot of our staff died during the assault.”

The C-Sec officer leaned over the counter, tucking a loose lock of hair behind an ugly, protruding ear that reminded Saren a bit of a bean. Her nose was a different shape than Shepard’s, her eyes grey. “I can’t fill out your request at the moment, but you can try here.” Somewhat hastily the human inputted a number into Bon Valam’s omni-tool. It pulled up a map: the directions to a civilian help desk that was **not** in charge of resettlement. “It’s not a permanent solution, but my friend Ava can give you a list of hotels that are still in operation. You can stay there.”

“I… cannot… stay at a hotel,” the volus wheezed, standing on his tiptoes as he tried to keep his eyes level with the human’s. “I do not… have… the credits. The terminals... _huff_... are down. You... _heeez…_ have frozen my **funds** –”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman reiterated, and she genuinely meant it. She tried to pull up some additional identification on her console, but was met with an angry _beep._ The officer frowned and shook her head. “Our records might have been corrupted during the attack. If you take a number and wait over there by the wall, I’ll try to fast-track you. My break starts soon, but my boss won’t mind if I squeeze you in, I think.”

There was kindness there, but the volus couldn’t feel it. The shame of poverty was clinging to him like a badly made pressure suit. He was terrified that others could see.

“No... thank you,” the volus said, his breaths still rasping. He turned around and tried not to think of how the human was looking at him. Pity translated too well across species. Bon Valam just wanted his life back.

Eventually the volus’ schedule returned to something resembling normal. His shop full of fine liqueurs was still dust on the wind, his finances in shambles, but all was not ending. One day he ran into one of his former associates: an asari named Mira T’Veza, long-limbed and graceful. An ex-commando turned acquisitions specialist, T’Veza was based out of Noveria. Her business had been somewhat disrupted by Shepard too, and Saren remembered why.

The land of sour yellow notes, Noveria was, where Matriarch Benezia had met her ending. She’d been useful too. She had also been his friend.

“The things we do for love, Saren,” the asari had said, her hands on his face. Her voice had cracked with grief, her eyes dark and hopeless. She had the same number of fingers as a human, but her skin was blue. “The _things_ , etched into our memories.”

He missed her, sometimes. He regretted their ending.

“It’s a terrible place we find ourselves in,” T’Veza sighed, sitting across from the volus in a floor-length black dress. She held a deep red drink in one hand with a single silver bangle decorating her wrist. There were speckles on her face that reminded Saren too much of Shepard.

“It… has been… _heeez…_ a terribly stressful time for me,” the volus agreed, sitting in a grey leather chair that was two times too big for him. His stubby legs poked out in front of his belly like the limbs on a hatchling’s toy. Valam was not drinking on account of his suit, but he was leaning back, his elbow braced on the armrest and a worried, trembling hand pressed to his forehead. Morosely, he watched transports zip alongside the wreckage of the Presidium. Hovercars glittered like beetles, the air filling with the familiar _zing_ and _zann_ of their passing. It brought him little comfort, as his life was still a mess.

Saren—crouched in his visor—didn’t watch them. He watched the asari. His attention was fixed on the spots that traveled the length of her body, clearly visible through the plunging _V_ of her dress. Briefly he wondered if Shepard had them down there, too.

T’Veza smiled at the volus, taking a sip of her drink. _Wine_ , Saren remembered suddenly. That was the name of the drink she was carrying. Some sort of human beverage.

“How much did you lose?” the asari asked. It was the question everyone parroted, the only thing that anyone ever talked about. There was no mention of Reapers. At best, there were whispers of geth.

“My… shop,” Valam replied, wheezing again. “All of it.” His anxiety was a hungry beast, his breaths growing shorter. _Imposter, imposter,_ T’Veza’s pale blue eyes seemed to say. Without his shop no one recognized him: another faceless volus amongst a faceless species who had yet to make their mark on the galaxy. “It was… _heeez_ … on the Promenade, towards the… _huff…_ entrance. My store was crushed, and I lost… my next shipment. My creditors are calling. I… have **loans**... to… pay off.”

“Loans to whom?” the asari mused over the rim of her wine glass. There was a promise there, but the volus didn’t see it. He was too concerned with his own authenticity and lack of self-worth. Valam’s free hand clenched in its glove.

“Ansara,” he said. “One of your… compatriots.”

“An asari? Where from?”

“Illium,” he said, his voice wavering further. _No one sees me. No one cares._ “She… handles loans for... _heeez…_ non-occupied Citadel space.”

T’Veza put her drink down, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward. Saren listened with one phantom ear, but his attention remained fixed on her dress.

“Ansara?” T’Veza asked. “ _The_ Ansara Sederis, as in Jona’s sister?”

Bon Valam felt even more miserable. He nodded slightly.

“That’s... the one.”

Mildly curious, Saren went digging for the reason why Ansara Sederis was so notorious. He found it lingering on the tip of volus’ tongue. _Ah_ , he discovered. An accountant for the _Eclipse_ , little sister to their incumbent overlord. As humans liked to colloquially term it, Valam the volus was a dead man.

T’Veza made a face, quirking her brow. One hand wrung the wrist of another, fiddling with the delicate silver bangle that hung there. She was a beautiful creature, but Saren preferred his Corpse.

“Why would you make a deal with _her_?” she finally asked, reaching into a seamless pocket along the curve of her hip. T’Veza withdrew a small metal container and a human-styled lighter, slouching back in her seat. She opened up the case and pulled out a slim, pale stick. _Cigarettes_. Smoking was an out-of-style human tradition, but the younger asari had been picked it up as a trend. Saren didn’t know if Shepard smoked, but she didn’t seem the type. The only fumes he’d ever been able to smell came from the incendiary bullets his geth had punched through her armor.

“It was a good… deal… at… the time,” the volus wheezed. T’Veza placed the cigarette between her painted lips, flicking her lighter once or twice before putting the device back in her pocket. She took a long drag before spreading her arms in either direction along the back of the couch.

“I was… in very… _huff…_ good standing with my debtors, and I needed to expand my business. Ansara… was looking… for venture… capitalists... in… the Citadel, and I offered to collaborate. I never… I didn’t…” Valam gasped, overcome with emotion. “I never expected my business… _heeez_! To be crushed by a… _heeez!_ By a giant… _heeez!_ Geth… _heeez_! I don’t... have... the insurance! They lost... my records!”

He was almost sobbing.

The ex-commando nodded in understanding, tapping ash off on the arm of her couch. Her speckles were not as noticeable as Shepard’s, Saren decided—they blended into her skin better. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

“It is a sad place we find ourselves in,” the asari agreed, echoing her earlier statement. “A lot of people are hurting. I’m sure Ansara will understand.”

“She... will not.”

T’Veza smiled tightly. She leaned close, folding her arms over her knee. “I may have a way out of this,” she admitted, speaking in a low, suggestive manner. Her lips were painted like a human’s too. “She’s an associate of mine: a competitor of Ansara’s, based out of Omega. You ever been there?”

“No.”

T’Veza nodded thoughtfully, tapping ash onto the floor.

“I would have to arrange a meeting between you two in person,” she admitted, taking another drag. The smoke left her lips in pale grey rings. “And you’d have to go there. Her business is too complex for her to leave it for long. But if you’re willing to sign an exclusive procurement contract, I’m sure she would bankroll you out of your dealings with Ansara. Are you interested?”

The volus was. He leaned forward eagerly, nodding once.

“What’s… your associate’s… name?”

T’Veza smiled demurely and reached for the volus’ hand. Her blue palm gently cupped the back of his, activating his omni-tool as she typed in a set of instructions.

“Later,” she promised, inputting a numerical sequence that Saren didn’t recognize. She stamped out her cigarette on the table. “The Citadel has ears. Call this number at 17:00 hours. Tell them A’Shan sent you and you’re looking to get rid of some silk. They’ll put you in touch with a batarian named Sella. He’ll handle things from there.”

Once T’Veza finished inputting the data she stood in a slither of fabric. For a second time Saren imagined _her_ in the exact same dress. “I’ll make sure my associate knows you’re coming and draft up a contract.”

The volus thanked her, and the two shook hands.

“A pleasure doing business with you,” T’Veza said. Then more softly, and completely honest, “I’m sorry about your business, Valam. These are tough times and I wish they were better.”

“Likewise,” Bon Valam said, but for the first time in a long while he felt hope. Here was an equal: someone who cared. _I’m not an imposter._ He could get his life back.

Later that evening the volus dialed the number provided and spoke to a salarin. The enforcer’s voice was nasally and high, his responses to Valam clipped.

“What do you want?”

For a moment Valam felt anxious.

“A’Shan... sent me,” he replied, wheezing through his mask. Had he inputted the wrong number? “I have... to get rid... of... some silk.”

It was enough.

Both Saren and Valam learned later that night that they were being smuggled off the station on a smuggler’s vessel at 06:00 hours, run by the batarian Sella. _Travel light_ , the salarian said. _Leave your omni-tool and get something untraceable_. The volus agreed and slept better. He’d dealt with less-than-scrupulous types before, and knew he could handle it.

The next morning Valam woke bright and early, packing a small silver case. A few rations and the mustard yellow blanket from his refugee bed, along with the hospitality mints that the relief volunteers had left on his table. That was it.

Before he left he turned around, surveying the room he’d been staying in. He eyed the metal bunkbeds, the too-bright lights and the singular window that looked out at nothing. The volus sighed through his mask, and Saren sensed a wave relief. It wasn’t his.

“Won’t be... seeing you... again,” Bon Valam declared. With that he left.

After a quick pat-down by the guards and a quicker introduction with the batarian captain, Valam was on board and jetting off for the Terminus. Saren settled down for the ride, unable to change things and un-curious as to where they were going. Individual lives had no meaning in the grand scheme of things, he’d learned earlier on. Shepard’s **did** , but the Lovely Corpse was not there and she was not behind him either. Unless it concerned her, he couldn’t muster the energy to care about anything.

* * *

 

Omega was a dark place, the sound of its song similar to the sad, uneven whine of a human violin. It vibrated with frequencies that made Saren think of a solipsism: of lost opportunities and low-grade grief and the talents of the many being squandered down hundred-foot mine shafts. Red lights flashed along a closed horizon. Rusted metal dripped with condensation, loose leafs of garbage sticking to wire grids hastily soldered over ventilation shafts. Inhabitants on the lower levels moved with fugitive, skittish glances, keeping their heads low. Along the docks and the tangle of clubs that inhabited the upper decks, the beat of the music was constant, neon promenades flashing fuchsia and pink mixed with yellow. Everyone carried weapons in the open. Gunfire rang out on a near-constant basis.

Bon Valam arrived without much fuss and little fanfare. Saren felt him stumble off the ship—blinking in the off-putting drone of the neon lights—after which he obtains a set of instructions on when and where to meet his contact.

Breathing heavily in the new atmosphere, but still hopeful, Valam purchased a slightly-less seedy room at _Madame Vesa’s Hostel_ , to stay the night. Once the volus was asleep, Saren briefly left his pressure suit to explore Omega’s circuitry, slithering through data ports and methodically working his way through ill-prepared systems as he searched for info on _her_. He found none except rumors and propaganda posters. By now he was halfway interested in finding his adversary, but he still had to do the finding and he needed a body first. The volus was getting tiring.

In his more poetic moments, Saren called Omega the _Shatterpeak_ : breaker of bones and spirits. It did not matter to him that its name had been different, as to him titles and designations were temporary things left over for the living. The only name that mattered was that of the Lovely Corpse. He dreamt of her hands in a cold, clinical fashion, of so many fingers wriggling like white worms in the shadows. Shepard have never touched him before he’d put a gun to his head, but he could visualize how she’d move from the way she’d clawed at his wrist when he’d tried to choke her.

Her neck had been so thin, her pulse jumping beneath his talons. He felt constrained by her not-presence, overwhelmed by this being who should have been nothing more than a fly on the wall. After peeling back layers of security systems and racing through Omega’s conduits, Saren returned to the volus, bodiless and angry. He wondered if Shepard felt constrained by him too: if she thought about him as she stalked the corridors of the _Normandy_.

The next morning when Bon Valam awoke, Saren was stewing. The volus’ pressure suit glitched a bit with his anger, but not so much that things were unmanageable. Such a visible reminder of his own ineptitude made Saren’s anger worse. Shepard. Shepard. Everywhere he looked he saw ghosts of her passing. He couldn’t whisper words about her to his host through the body he was inhabiting, as he was just a visitor. If he saw her by chance on Omega, what could he do? The more he began to obsess over the idea, the more his resolve returned. A ghost he was, tied down by unfinished business.

Saren could sense Valam’s nervousness through the hitch in his stilted breathing; the way he double-checked his pressure suit to make sure the valves were working, his visor polished. He wanted to look his best. _Today is a new day_ , Valam told himself, staring at his own rotund figure in the cracked, spotted mirror. Today he would prove himself. He reviewed the contents of his silver briefcase to make sure all was in order, then his omni-tool to double-check the time. _Afterlife, 13:00 hours. Ask for Nuzk_.

Feeling more confident that he had in awhile, Valam went to the door, hitting the switch to let it slide it open. Beyond the walkway he could view Omega’s upper decks and scrambled highways, red lights flickering from the domed, colossal ceiling. _The Land of Opportunity_ , the krogan called it. Maybe it was his land, too.

“A new… day,” the volus said, taking a step out the door. It shut behind him with a _ping_.

There was a screeching sound, followed by a _bang_. Bon Valam turned to his left. The last thing Saren saw through the volus’ eyes was a sheet of cherry red rushing towards him. A car crash he learned later on: a freak accident brought on by a faulty brake.

Saren slithered away from Valam's corpse into a nearby street sign. Death had a way of granting ignoble births.

After that there was no ending. No ceasing of the streets that covered Omega, slathered with grime and rust. There was no end to the vent ducts and the constant red lighting. It throbbed, like a living creature; like the blue blood running through the trackwork of veins beneath plates he no longer possessed. Trapped, Saren was, but in truth all he did was wander. He never tried to escape. Omega was vast and the filth fascinated him, cycles of decay brought down to the minuscule. There was beauty in the mundane, he though, in the ugliness of useless things. Maybe that’s what Benezia had meant when she’d said there was still good in the universe.

He still thought of her, sometimes. The _other_ her, small and pale, singing soft purple notes of sadness. In the pipes of Omega he dreamt of Shepard's skin, of her many-fingered hands cradling his face. Humans were a bit like asari, Saren decided. The only real difference was the life cycle.

_“Help me,”_ Shepard said in the tangient otherworld of Omega’s crimson radiance, and her face was on all the posters, sometimes with a bounty attached. She’d climb out of the extranet, the pixels on the screens warping as she reached for him. _“Help me, Saren.”_

Anderson chose well, Saren decided. Shepard was too good for the human. He should have taken her under his wing the first time he’d seen her at the Council, but that’s what Harbinger had wanted. Better that he’d blinked.

After a while Saren found another host: the mech of an Eclipse enforcer. It was promptly blown to bits three days later by a warlord’s underlings, and Saren—tired of having his brains shattered to scrap—avoided complex machines past that point. Soulless, they were, dead hosts designed for the slaughter. He tried a vorcha’s headset next.

It took him weeks to get the slime off his phantom shoulders. What a revolting creature.

“Me get it first!” the vorcha wailed, bashing down a door with the butt of his perfectly good rifle. There were grenades on his hip. The damn door was unlocked. Saren thanked the sweet Spirits and the Elder Gods above that he’d never enlisted vorcha as underlings. The whole lot of them were walking disasters. Geth and their perpetual inability to bring Shepard to heel were better than this.

_Thunk, thunk, thunk!_ went the butt of the vorcha’s rifle against the door. They were conducting a robbery in the human quarter of Omega’s residential area against unarmed civilians. Already three vorcha had died in the span of five minutes, one of them eaten alive by his own varren. Saren did the Spirits’ equivalent of rolling his eyes, waiting for the whole event to be over. There was a poster of Shepard on the wall next to the entrance. There were no bruises on her face or neck, like the ones that he’d given her. Saren imagined her in the asari’s black dress again; floor length with a high collar and no sleeves, the _v_ plunging down to her naval.

Yes, much better than _this._

The door gave way with a thud. Inside was a human woman with an asari child, huddled in the corner by the bed. A mixed family, it looked like. It gave Saren pause.

“Me get it first!” the vorcha crowed, walking in with a cocky saunter. Then there was a _thud_ ; the shuddering _kong_ of a frying pan hitting the back of his pasty head.

“STAY AWAY FROM MY MOM!” the second child wailed. It was another asari brat, her eyes far too human for Saren’s comfort. The woman cried out, reaching for her child in alarm.

“Levaia, no!”

The vorcha shrieked in surprise and dropped the gun. The trigger went off, showering the room in a spray of bullets. Saren’s host died immediately, his own incendiary rounds going straight through his temple.

Disgusted, Saren drifted away from the body into that of his fellow robber: a slightly less foolish, miserable soul who was at least remembered how to keep a firm grip on his gun. The vorcha lasted a few weeks longer than his predecessor before falling down an ill-used mineshaft.

_Geth_. _Give me Geth._ Saren longed for the days where Shepard was scuttling under fully-armed tanks to detonate them with explosives.

_Maybe I’m better off as a hood ornament,_ he mused, sliding into the skin of yet another bottom-dweller. _Perhaps a light switch on the wall_. The Shatterpeak was boring and fascinating all at once, but the lives of the living were draining him.

The next day, rather abruptly, he learned that Shepard had died.

Her death came about like a whisper—a terrible truth that he heard by accident. His latest host—another vorcha—was ambling down a street in mid-level Omega, heading past seedy, all-hours bars with questionable health records. Lights vibrated overhead, casting the rusted walkway in perpetual vermilion. The vorcha’s footsteps were loping, the ground thudding beneath his weight. His companions ambled beside him, a mangy looking varren snapping at their heels. It’s name was _Tusk._

Ahead on the walkway were a collection of mercs standing around a flickering extranet poster; turians and batarians, mostly, but a few krogans and an asari were thrown into the mix. The asari was standing with her left hand braced against the wall, leering suggestively at the poster. Whatever it was, she seemed to like it.

“Damn shame,” said the turian beside her—a Blue Sun with a bare face. The vorcha continued walking, blissfully unaware of the conversation. His mind was fixed on dinner; roasted pyjak meat that he could share with his varren. Saren paid attention to the merc’s conversation with a single ear. “Real beauty for a human.”

“Got a fetish?” his friend—another turian—joked, elbowing him in the side. The Blue Sun _huffed_ , his mandibles extending in the approximation of a grin.

“No,” he said, cocky and self-assured, but somewhat muted by age. “Just a working pair of eyes. Look at that waist.”

“Too small,” a krogan said, gesturing with his hands. There was a rocket launcher almost as big as he was strapped to his back. “Crest is good though. Nice red.”

At the mention of _red_ , Saren perked up. He began to listen with two phantom ears rather than one. The vorcha marched past.

“How’d she die?” a batarian asked. As he did the vorcha turned his head to scratch at his back, his visor-clad eye moving in the direction of the extranet poster.

“Firefight,” the Blue Sun said. “Her ship got dusted.” His next words were a laugh, his taloned hand coming up to scratch at his head. “Spirits, the humans are gonna lose it. There’s this whole cult around her back on the Citadel. She’s their first Spectre.”

Through the throngs of mercs in between armored shoulders, Saren finally saw a familiar face: red hair and bright green eyes, the woman’s high cheekbones decorated with asari speckles.

His world abruptly went black.

Lights flickered, then sparked, shorting out en mass. The visor he was resting in exploded, the vorcha’s head a second later. The body dropped to the ground with a _splatter_ and a convulsing of limbs.

The walls of the corridor groaned, the flickering lights turning into a rolling blackout. An entire block of Omega went down in six seconds flat, life support shutting off before the emergency systems kicked in.

Saren diffused into the conduits, shrieking. He found himself voiceless.

His mind went blank with a strange sort of terror. He rushed to the Dark Place, scrambling onto the pedestal of pain and pulling back the nest of wires as he searched for her. His Lovely Corpse was not there.

There was an empty spot where Shepard’s body had been, and his grief grew loud at the silence. _I warned you,_ Harbinger rumbled, and Saren scattered into billions of pieces, racing through conduits and searching the extranet for her presence. He couldn’t find her. He’d felt nothing when she’d passed. Shepard was nowhere, not in the land of the living nor the dead. He returned to the nest of wires and she was still not there. The _lack_ of her was akin to being forgotten.

“Help me,” she’d said, reaching for him with terrible hands and too many fingers, but Saren hadn’t. Whole universes lived and died where she didn’t exist. It was a terrifying, existential sort of despair. Here were the bones holding reality together. Here were the bones broken again. No wonder Harbinger wanted her.

Saren wandered.

He drifted, disoriented by a sensation that he refused to call _grief_. He slithered through conduits and took no bodies except for those of the dead, wrapping himself around abandoned equipment as a way to ground himself to a spirit that had passed without him. Time became meaningless, his own death replaying without end. This time, Shepard was the one on the platform with her gun pressed to her temple.

_“Help me,”_ she gasped, and he rush forward, talons outstretched. She pulled the trigger, her body dropping like a loosened puppet. He never made it in time.

Through the awful, sideways sadness, Saren eventually found _him_. It was a silly, inconsequential happenstance; the universe’s way of revealing a pattern.

He’d been resting in the unused heat-sink of a dead merc’s rifle for almost three days, the body collapsed in an alleyway on Omega’s upper levels. Crimson light flickered through the artificial fog of the asteroid’s interior, puddles of greasy water collecting in a hollow dip beneath the corpse. A batarian, Saren assumed from the four eyes, but the body was rotting. There were no thoughts from the alien, nor that of his gun: just silence and the sound of Saren’s own pistol. _Thak, thak, thak,_ it went _._ Footsteps in the hall, he learned later on.

Feet appeared in his line of vision. Turian feet, heavily armored, their pace slowing as they stopped by the corpse’s head. Their owner turned to stare at the gun.

Saren watched with zero interest as the turian crouched down, reaching for the weapon and lifting it up to inspect it. The mercenary had a scope over one eye and a massive sniper rifle strapped to his back. He was armored, but he wore no helmet. A hood covered his crest, shadowing bright blue eyes.

The turian’s expression was one of a dull sort of sadness, his features pinched. His plates were flaking with stress. The merc eyed the gun for a bit, then with a perfunctory quickness began dismantling it, stripping the weapon of it’s salvageable parts. Young, he was, with the kind of face Saren’s brother would have sneered at: if he wasn’t so ill he would’ve been remarkably attractive. _Too flashy for active service_ , Desolas used to say. _They get by on their connections._

The turian’s colony markings were from Palaven, the thick blue lines _pinging_ something in the back of Saren’s brain. Suddenly the slightly recognizable features became horrifyingly familiar. He was so used to seeing Shepard’s second-in-command beside her that the sharpshooter was almost unrecognizable by himself.

“Hey Archangel!” someone called, further down the walk. A human carrying too many grenades jogged up to them, dressed like an infiltrator.

Shepard’s lieutenant continued to disassemble the gun in silence, the corridor filling with the sharp _click_ and _clack_ of the machine being broken into bits. A second later the human reached them, coming to a loping standstill, feet splashing through the puddle. “You got something?” he asked, breathing hard.

Archangel stood and turned. In that moment, Saren made a choice.

Crackling through gun parts, Saren snaked from the corpse into the armor of the turian, coming to rest in his visor. “Heat sinks and scopes,” Archangel said, and Saren learned that his name was _Garrus_. He saw himself through the turian’s eyes; he felt seething rage and the tightening of plates across his chest when the rogue Spectre had grabbed his commander by the throat, lifting her up. “They’re still good.”

There was pain, silently shrieking through the darkness. Grief was a monster, with claws and teeth in his throat. Saren saw Shepard walking ahead of him, heavily armed but a bit on the short side. She was turning around and grinning ear-to-ear, speckles splashed across cheeks like the stars in the Serpent Nebula.

Shepard was laughing. Shepard was drinking. Shepard was sitting cross-legged on a bench in nothing but her skivvies, lovingly fawning over a brand new rifle. Shepard was dying and he wasn’t there.

“Need help?” the human asked, and Garrus turned to his comrade, plates feeling pinched as he pilfered the rest of the gun parts and dropped the frame on the ground. Saren saw the haunting image of dead, open eyes, a corpse floating through space. _I would follow you unto death but you left without me_. Spirits take him, there was no way out of this body. He could barely breathe. He was trapped in grief that felt endless.

“No, I’m done. Where’s Erash?”

“Out back. You sure you’re alright? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine,” Garrus said. He wasn’t.

The turian brought out his assault rifle, tugging his hood further down his crest to shadow his eyes. He tried not to think about anything other than moving forward; better to be dead, because it made living easier. “Grab the others. We need to ghost before the Suns know we’re here.”

“Roger that.”

The human turned, sticking two fingers in his mouth to whistle loudly. He waved a gloved hand towards the end of the tunnel. Shadows melted out of the red lit gloom.

Archangel stepped back, leading the way deeper into Omega’s underbelly. Saren died, over and over again, drowning in the remembrance of a crimson-haired idol.

For the next year he remained chained to a walking corpse.

* * *

 

In the end his time with Garrus was probably _less_ than a year. Saren’s host was running on the fumes of a death wish, and while Archangel kept busy, neck deep in bodies, his mind was wasted. There was such an emptiness inside that it felt like eons had passed.

Saren found himself immersed in memories that were not his own. He remembered the smell of her hair; the scent of her off-duty jacket. He was walking down a blue-lit alley as she stumbling beside him, his taloned hand spread against the side of her waist. His other hand clutched hers as she clung to him, laughing. She was tripping over her own feet. Her red hair was tied in a bun.

“Garrus,” she slurred, and Shepard was collapsing on her cot in a tangle of limbs, the mattress wobbling beneath her weight. Talons that were not his own reached down, carefully removed shoes from tiny feet, accidentally slicing through an errant lace as he put them on the ground near the base of her bed. He removed her guns next.

“ _Garrus_ ,” she repeated on a sigh. He dared to reach out, his hand cupping her face.

Shepard smiled like the stars and put her hand over his, those terrible fingers curling around much larger talons. She turned her head and kissed his palm, and Saren drowned with nostalgia for something that had never been his.

“You’re drunk, Shep,” Garrus said. In this memory there was a soft sort of sadness, intermingled with a growing realization that he was in too deep.

“I am,” she agreed, humming happily, and her green eyes were watering, just a bit. There might have been tears. “I wish it was over.”

“It will be,” he said, and she clutched him harder. She kissed his palm again.

It was quiet moments like these that did Saren in; the terrifyingly intimate that he hadn’t known about. _The universe is beautiful_ , Benezia had said. _Don’t destroy it._

“You’re a good friend, Garrus,” Shepard told him, and the turian allowed himself to run a thumb over her cheek, careful of the softness beneath his claw. Human skin broke so easily. They’d run into an associate of Shepard’s that day, a warlord from her past named Aria. She’d drunk more heavily than usual. “Thanks for lying for me.”

“Anytime,” he promised, and Shepard smiled, her cheek twisting beneath his hand with the movement. There was a sweetness there, beneath the guns and the blood and the bruises. Saren would never get to know it in person.

“You don’t look so good,” Weaver said, and in the real world Saren’s host stared with dead eyes towards dead men and told himself to keep going. Headshots for her, against all those who’d wronged her. Time broke. Time stumbled. Archangel killed one too many. Saren spent his time remembering phantom sensations, drifting through universes. When he came back to the present he found his host standing still. He was surrounded by bodies and his team was dead.

_This is it_ , Garrus decided. He grabbed what ammo he could and made for the roof. His eyesight blurred with the time he spent shooting, talons callused by the grip of his gun. _KRAKOW_ , went sound of his sniper rifle, again and again. Through the scope rose fountains of blood, gifts of sacrifice to a god who’d left him. He was coming for her. Gunning.

“Do you think there’s an afterlife?” Shepard had asked, and they were back on the Citadel, sitting on the docks near the _Normandy_. They were looking up at the stars through spirals of purple dust.

“I don’t know, Shep. Turians say we do.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I hope there is,” she admitted, sticking her hands in her pockets: she was in off-duty clothes for once. Shepard looked too small without her armor. “I want there to be _more_ when I go.”

“Why would you say that?” he demanded. The thought was horrifying, but her laugh wasn’t.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, shrugging casually, her slender legs stretched out in front of her. Above them an Alliance warship rumbled past, burning Eezo behind it. “It’s just a feeling I got these days, you know? This weird buzz in my stomach. When I think about all the stuff I’ll never get to do, I feel sad.”

“I want to ship out with you,” he admitted. There was a burning sensation in his chest; a hot feeling in his throat. Shepard nodded.

“Soon,” she said in agreement, her eyes trained on the stars. “Let’s get through the red tape first.”

They didn’t.

The rifle fired, again and again. His shoulder felt broken. There was a ghost on the catwalk, slinking through piles of corpses. She didn’t go down. _It’s time_ , Garrus decided. A few more shots; a few more dead mercs. Grenades went off.

Then abruptly, the ghost came walking through the door.

Nebula exploded before stitching back together. Time warped, years passing in the blink of an eye. His host thought he was dreaming and Saren did too, but there she was. There **she** was, marching through that rocket-scored entrance, all flesh and muscle. Small and lithe with burning green eyes, Shepard was, decked out in pitch-black armor with a single red arm. Those terrible hands reached forward, scrabbling around a waist and back that wasn’t his.

“Garrus?” Shepard said. Her expression was full of relief, her complexion pallid. The body that Saren was inhabiting sagged with shock, propped up by the massive gun that he’d been using. _No, no._ He couldn’t deal with the mirage: with something this cruel. He couldn’t go through it again.

“Shep?!” Garrus asked.

Flickering blackness turned solid, followed by heat. There was a flash of roaring light, the sensation of sinking _inwards_.

“HELP ME!” Shepard was screaming, and suddenly the body that Saren was inhabiting was on the ground. The phantom limbs that had been haunting him for so long were no longer so phantom. When he tried to breath he discovered something was clogging his throat. His face was on fire. Two bodies were one.

Shepard was leaning over him, her palm pressed to the burning spot on his neck. The other was stroking his cheek.

“Garrus?” she said. Her green eyes were glowing red, her cheeks smeared with navy. Shepard was alive. She was alive and she was with him. “Garrus? No, no, no. Stay with me. Garrus! Garrus! Help! SOMEONE HELP!”

Saren didn’t even care that she wasn’t saying his name; that he was dying again. He’d finally found her, winding amongst the wires of the Shatterpeak. The Lovely Corpse had returned to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author’s Note**
> 
> And thus, we come to ‘the twist’ in our story. We hope everyone continues to enjoy the plot as we advance along! As always, thank you for reading, kudo’ing, and commenting!
> 
> **Intel**
> 
>   * Our dearly departed Bon Valam comes from a race of sentient beings known as the [**Volus**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Volus). Volus hail from the planet Irune, an especially high-pressure atmosphere world. Coming from a planet with a unique atmospheric chemistry and pressure requires them to wear specialized suits when they’re offworld. Among the Citadel species they’re known as shrewd tradesmen and bankers.
>   * [Indoctrination ](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Indoctrination)is the process through which a Reaper controls an organic or artificial being. Saren Arterius was indoctrinated over time by Sovereign, a Reaper who sought to advance the coming of his species so they could continue the Cycle. In our story, Shepard was able to use the canon option in _Mass Effect 1_ to convince Saren of his own indoctrination—thus he took his own life in an effort to exercise his free will one final, fatal time.
> 



	5. Those Without Air

One minute it was a reunion. The next all the air had been sucked out of the room. Fire consumed the front end of the sniper’s perch, wreathing tables and chairs in flames. The rest of the squad hit the walls and flooring as the shockwave shoved them back in a tremendous push.

Heat and the force of the explosion flattened Shepard against the floor, blowing out her shields. Garrus, swallowed by the impact of the rocket’s implosion, was ripped from her line of sight before her face met the backend of some furniture. There was a ringing in her ears as the tinnitus died down and the pressure in the room returned to normal.

_Should have kept your helmet on_ , her brain reminded her gently.

Her post-explosion ritual kicked in. Toes were wiggled. Fingertips scraped against the inside of her gloves. Ass was still attached and her head was still stuck in place. Once she became convinced she hadn’t lost any limbs or motor functions—yet again—Shepard sucked in a mouthful of air to be pushed out through her lungs in a short, even rhythm. She eased herself up under the weight of her guns, grasping the skeleton of a burned-out couch to keep herself steady.

Miranda was trying to peel herself out from under the burning wreckage of a table. She finally managed to get free with a biotic pull that sent the debris spiraling lazily towards the ceiling.

“Sound off: who ain’t dead?” Zaeed shouted. He had fared better than most, as he didn’t look any more carbon-scorched than usual and had regained his footing. He was holding a position by the balcony outside of the room.

“Here,” Jacob managed to cough from his spot near the back wall, favoring one side as he struggled to his feet. Kasumi was sprawled next to him by the remains of a cargo crate, her body glitching in and out of stealth mode before she cut the power to her tactical cloak.

“Mostly here—might’ve lost a good bit of my hearing on that one,” the thief said as she sat up, patting one side of her head while dipping the other half towards the ground. She looked like she was trying to shake water out of her ears after swimming.

“Only natural after thermal explosions. Expect full hearing to return within a day or two,” Mordin chirped from where he stood. The salarian was miraculously in better shape than Zaeed. He only had a few scuffs, having taken refuge behind a low wall before the the rocket hit. He then proceeded to rattle off in great detail how long one could survive with third-degree burns of a chemical nature. For science.

Zaeed scoffed at the topic, leaving his spot by the balcony to stalk the room and survey the damage. “You kids just **had** to be upstaged by the old men because you forgot how to take proper cover from a bloody rocket.” He kicked away torqued furniture, peering at something beneath. Shepard felt like she had forgotten something before she heard the reedy, muffled intake of a wet gasp.

Zaeed froze near the spot where she’d been knocked from.

“Aw, **shite** ,” the merc growled, collapsing his assault rifle before clipping it to the magnetic locks on the back of his chassis. He disappeared out of sight behind the wreckage, crouching down next to… where they...

**Garrus**. Where was Garrus? Garrus had been there. The rocket.

Shepard felt the pit of her stomach fall out.

“Garrus!”

Dormant adrenaline surged through her veins, bringing her off the floor and hurtling her over the space that separated them in a flash of unhinged biotics. When Shepard reached the dark, mangled lump splayed over the shattered tiles she collapsed to her knees, fingers scrabbling across the broken shielding of his keel as she searched for a handhold. A bright spurt of blue blood splattered across her armor before her fingers darted towards it, rooting around for a fruitless few seconds before they clamped down on whatever artery was gushing from Garrus’ ruined neck.

“HELP ME!” she screamed over her shoulder, bringing all the heads in the room swiveling towards the gory tableau spread behind crates and burnt-out couches. A single azure eye stared at her from the smoking ruin of Garrus’ face, rolling wildly in its socket. Her hand cupped the unruined half in return, the sharp edge of her glove catching against the joint where his mandible and cheekbone met. The turian’s tattoos were splayed across his face like a broken warband. “Garrus? No, no, no. Stay with me. Garrus! Garrus! Help! SOMEONE HELP!”

“Doc, y’better get over here snappy-like!” Zaeed shouted to Mordin, stepping over Shepard’s prone form and passing Miranda as he made his way back to the entry of the crow’s nest.

Blue blood. Cornflower blue. It congealed thickly on her gloves, coating the mesh to the point where her grip became slick and clumsy. Garrus’ pulse stuttered like a half-spoken word against the meat of her palm. He tried to say something, but all that came out was a wet gurgle. His visible eye rolled back in his head and his body seized.

“He’s not breathing—no, no, **no**.” Shepard stumbled over the words, her voice taking on a pitch of hysteria. Miranda knelt down and tried to take control of the situation, attempting to gently move her back from the body. Mordin simply elbowed his way in and withdrew a device from one of his many pockets. Zaeed and Jacob held up what passed for a perimeter while the latter radioed in.

“Ground team to _Normandy_ , we need immediate medical evac. One friendly is critical, dextro-based chirality if you’re sending meds. Transmitting our coordinates now.” Jacob’s words mostly managed to make it into Shepard’s brain over the dull roar crowding its spaces.

“Shepard—need you to move back and slowly remove fingers from the tear. Must stop the bleeding! Shepard? _Shepard_ ,” Mordin’s volume gradually increased until his voice was blaring in her ear.

Shepard sat there, numb and disconnected from her limbs. She couldn’t feel her fingers. Miranda had Garrus’ other arm in her hand: she was fumbling with the controls of his omni-tool to try and dispense medi-gel to him through his armor’s systems. His beryl-esque blood looked garish against the pearl white of her bodysuit.

“ _Empty_ ,” she nearly spat. “He must’ve run out before we got here. Is anyone carrying dextro-based gel?!” She was met with a chorus of _no’s_.

_I should’ve._ Shepard had know what they were getting into and she hadn’t.

Whatever device Mordin procured from his pocket, it stopped the blood from pulsing wetly against Shepard’s face after someone pulled her fingers free from Garrus’ neck. She’d been trained for situations like these—she had been in them a few times herself—but nothing she’d done had prepared her for the gaping ruin on Garrus’ throat. His life poured into her hands like some sort of obscene bright blue puddle.

Mordin was speaking, but his words didn’t really register. Shepard wanted to flail her arms and legs, break free and go back to Garrus, but reality was hitting her hard and she was seizing up with her own panic. She couldn’t do a damn thing and it was in the salarian’s hands.

“They’ve got him Shepard,” Kasumi’s soft, lilting voice sunk into her mind. “There’s nothing you can do. Let’s find something to get him transported on.” Finally Shepard was able to process what was being said through the cloud of fear and anger. The rage was the worst: a specific, gnarled sort of thing directed at herself for being so utterly useless in saving her squadmate. The terror came from trekking so far, only to lose him when she’d just gotten him back. Fuck. Fuck, **Garrus** –

Kasumi left her side, jogging towards a pile of debris to sort out some pieces that were long and broad enough to carry an armored turian. Beneath Shepard’s feet a thick, syrupy lake of congealed fluid stuck to her soles, pulling away wetly with a soft _squelch_. In the puddle was Garrus’s visor, the screen cracked and the frame bent out of shape. At an arm’s length away was his rifle. Shepard felt enough sensation return to her limbs to crouch down and scoop up both items, the visor going into her pocket while the rifle’s barrel was carefully compressed into its compact, locked carrying position. She fastened the still-massive armament to a spare magnetic strip on her belt and joined Kasumi, her steps made uneven by the weight.

Focusing on finding a stretcher proved more grounding than anything else she could’ve done. It gave Shepard a goal to tunnel vision on, distracted her from Garrus’ still-choking noises as Mordin worked furtively over his body. By the time everyone grouped up to move him, some of the shock had worn off to the point where she could put two and two together. _You’re trained for this. You’re trained, you can handle it. This isn’t Akuze._

Blood trailed behind them onto the rusted floor as the team hoisted him up, sloping over the sides of the stretcher they’d made. Shepard tried to assure herself that it was just blood and not organs that had collected in his cowl before Mordin finally got the flow under control. All of their boots made a staccato beat against the metal, creating a _tap-tap-tap_ like a snare drum against the grubby stairs.

Serendipity was the word she’d use for having Mordin’s expertise on the squad at that exact place and point in time. He managed to stabilize Garrus’ vitals long enough for the turian’s heart to keep beating while they double-timed it to their transport. Shepherd carried the makeshift stretcher near his head while Zaeed supported the lower half. Ahead of them Mordin trotted alongside the odd convoy, the instrument that he’d conjured from one of his pockets held to Garrus’ neck. It was a makeshift circuit that was keeping the fluids flowing through the artery he’d clamped back together. A distant part of Shepard’s brain marveled at how well her squad was already shaping up in terms of cohesion and problem solving. Jacob kept pinging the _Normandy_ with their coordinates before the Kodiak hovered into view, approaching the bridge at an impressive speed before the pilot eased up on the accelerator.

Whoever was left behind the last barricade didn’t make a peep. The place had turned into a ghost town in a matter of minutes. Smoke drifted up from the chasm below the bridge. The burning wreckage of the gunship was below, hung on a ledge as the fuel cells slowly popped and exploded in a series of pale orange chemical clouds. The cavalry arrived only three-hundred seconds after Jacob’s distress call went out, Eezo burning off the Kodiak’s thrusters. It settled on the bridge on the least corpse-riddled area, the support struts crunching through the body of a dead Eclipse merc as the doors to the combat cockroach slid open. Jacob took point near the rear of the dropship, flagging them in with a waving arm.

“Getting chatter on the comms that a squad of Blue Suns is inbound from another sector! We’d better bounce!” he yelled over the engines of the idling Kodiak, shouldering up to help Shepard with the head of the stretcher. She transferred some of the weight to him and shuffled to Mordin’s side of the cot.

“Careful of his neck Shepard. Arterial spray, if the clamps should come off,” Mordin cautioned.

It was similar to watching pyjaks fuck, trying to get the turian-laden stretcher onto the cleared out floor of the dropship. Mordin ducked under Shepard’s arched arms, keeping a two-handed grip on the instrument plugged into Garrus’ neck.. When they finally managed to get him situated and strapped down, Shepard shuffled through the medkit for a medi-gel and an IV to mainline fluids into his arm.

“Strap in! Liftoff in three, two, one,” announced the crewman piloting the Kodiak. The automated doors slid shut, everyone piling in and sitting in a jumpseat save for Mordin and herself. Shepard decided that she’d have to make a point to learn the pilot’s name and shake his hand once they were out of the woods of this shitshow. The floor of the Kodiak shuddered and creaked, the whine of the engines overpowering her hearing as the tin can went airborne. Mordin took the dextro medi-gel from her outstretched hands.

“Best that I handle this? Most likely,” Mordin said, at the sight of Shepard’s uncomfortably-vulnerable shaking. He took the leads of the IV she had strung from the ceiling and the med-kit, and when he did Shepard slunk back, her hand flying to the soft hide of Garrus’ neck. His pulse was weak and skittering beneath her fingertips, like a trapped bird disappearing for handfuls of breaths. Occasionally it would pick back up after his chest expanded in a laborious inhale, but it was getting less frequent.

“We're losing him!” she said, desperation giving her voice a tinge of mania. _Can't lose him. Won't lose him. Gotta get to the medbay._ The thoughts went screaming through the hollow spaces in her head. Outside sounds were muffled. The only thing that she could perceive was blackness, followed by splotches of colors. So much blue, coating her hands. Then words started leaking in.

_Shepard. Shepard?_

“Shepard,” Kasumi began, leaning forward, then seemed to think better of it and closed her mouth. She sunk back in the seat.

“Garrus,” Shepard started, then sterner, “ **Garrus** , I swear if you fucking –” she couldn’t even finish the sentence. Emotion choked her words, forming a knot in her throat that she could barely swallow past.

Shepard shoved her head down and focused on his face instead, now covered with a breathing apparatus as Mordin worked to get an airflow established. The only connection that remained between them was the firm hold she kept on his limp palm, her own tightly fisted fingers curling around bare talons.

* * *

 

Ice cold water sluiced down her body. Fissures of red in her skin gave the nearby metal walls a dull vermillion glow. The pressure of an actual water-based shower spigot pounding the knots out of Shepard’s tense shoulders and neck. Bands of blood made pink rivulets down her skin, washing away the tattoo-like smears that were painted across her cheekbones from the firefight.

Her internal clock warned her that she’d loitered at least five minutes too long in the shower. She was using cold water on purpose, and her time limit was not so much to conserve the SR-2’s resources as it was to make sure she didn’t catch a cold. The first _Normandy_ had been utilitarian in the fact that it didn’t have water showers aboard. _Sonic_ was much more economical on anything of Alliance military design, and H2O was too much of a luxury to waste en masse. Not so much with the second warbird—Cerberus spared no expense.

_There’s no second six like a second ship, and you almost lost him._

Shepard dry-heaved a second later, bracing herself against the tiled wall as she was momentarily overwhelmed by flashes of bright blue blood. A shaky hand raked across the controls until the spray dies down to a trickle, then nothing. The scars on her face hurt badly, and she didn’t want to see if they’d gotten bigger.

She avoided the mirror and went straight to the bench holding her toiletries and a fresh change of her duty uniform. Shepard toweled off the water first, working inward towards her belly and torso before scrunching the fabric over her hair to wring out the moisture. Her atrophied fingers worked out the last of the knots before she twisted the wet mass into a sensible bun with the elastic she kept on her wrist. The second elastic that Chakwas had given her remained where it was: a constant, barely-there pressure against the soft underside of her limb. Once she’d smeared lotion over her cracking skin weaves, Shepard slid into her uniform: a gift from Cerberus. Some parts of the tunic caught along the half-healed neon-red edges, abrasive and rasping as she pulled up the black suit like a glove.

Quickly stuffing her belongings into a wall locker and exiting into the hall, Shepard pointedly ignored the medbay as she turned the corner. She snapped the second elastic around her wrist as she passed.

Shepard had managed to hold a six-hour vigil over Garrus’ body before Chakwas had forcibly ejected her from the medbay and commanded EDI to engage the security locks: medical personnel only. After calling the woman a “cunt” and staring at the security interface for a solid minute, Shepard had decided a vanguard charge through the sheet metal wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interest. She’d hit the showers next, formulating a slightly-less-insane plan to return to Garrus’ side. Now she was on the lookout for food. She needed to put something in her stomach, whether it was a protein shot or an actual MRE. Shepard hadn’t been able to keep down anything solid yet—a side-effect from lying on the slab for two years while being fed intravenously—but Chakwas said she was getting better. Shepard wasn’t too sure on that yet.

Showered but still stewing over the fact that Garrus was out of reach until she could present herself in a reasonable, fully-functioning fashion, she decided to go up to the CIC to plot her next course of action. She had to get off the floor before she killed something. Many somethings, all at once. When she exited onto the CIC most of the crew was loitering around their stations, largely ignoring her. Chambers, the yeoman, was manning her terminal and seemed to be the only one that took notice of Shepard’s entrance.

“Commander you have a priority message at your personal terminal.” Chambers’ upbeat voice still carried over the low din of _beeps_ and _pings_ flying from every corner of the command center. It was always a busy spot and one of the loudest areas on the ship besides the engine room.

It took a few seconds for Shepard’s terminal to boot up. She spent those moments dialing in to Jeff’s personal line through her omni-tool. Her fingers paused over the “dial” command once she read who the sender was on the most recently flagged message in her inbox.

“Look who decided to show up after all,” Joker’s jovial, always sarcastic voice filtered through her aural implant. The call had still gone through.

Shepard ignored him for a moment, her eyes hurriedly skimming the message in her inbox. Then she read it again. After the second read-through the meaning and the gravity of the message finally sunk in.

“Shepard? Did you ass-dial me?” Joker’s voice was slightly higher than normal, and hesitant. He sounded unsure.

“Kind of—I’ll call you back,” she said, terse and strained as she turned sharply on her heel to start the short march back through the armory.

“Chambers, get a signal to Alliance Command through the QEC, tell them it’s a priority transmission from Jane Shepard and don’t let them hang up on you.”

“Aye, aye, Commander,” Kelly said, hardpressed to get the sentence out in full before the doors to the armory slid shut behind her. Jacob was not in residence so Shepard continued on her way to the communications room. Eventually she was through two airlocks and standing in front of the dimly lit QEC, fidgeting nervously with the skin around her nails. She’d smeared medi-gel over the picked-over scabs and most had faded into silvered scars, but she kept on making new ones. Shepard clenched her fingers into her palms to stop herself from continuing the habit, turning her hands turn into fists before flexing them out once again, but it barely worked.

She wasn’t going to give Hackett the satisfaction of seeing her visibly rattled. The assholes hadn’t even given her an apathetic “hi, heard you were back” since she’d risen from the grave, and she **knew** they were watching. The extranet message proved it.

“Shepard, I have Alliance Command on the line. They’re requesting to ask a… challenge word to confirm your identity,” Chambers said.

“Fine,” Shepard spat. The most they’d given her up until this point was a blip on the terminal from Anderson, and even that was strained considering the circumstances. Now they were asking for favors? Hackett himself? Pigs would fly first.

Shepard queued up the QEC hologram to switch to a two-way channel and let the static fill the room. “Put the pimple-faced boot playing gatekeeper through.”

“Right away, Shepard,” Kelly replied, her voice as soothing as ever. Shepard was not. Her willpower to stand in court and testify to her “dereliction of duty” was brittle at best, and she could guess why Hackett was calling. She was flying Cerberus colors, after all.

“Alliance Command to Cerberus vessel,” came the high-pitched, nasally voice of the junior officer on the other end of the QEC’s connection. There wasn’t a hologram yet. Just audio. Shepard resisted the urge to flip the conference table over the marine’s refusal to acknowledge that the _Normandy_ was calling. The idea of looking the Admiral in the eye and maintaining any semblance of civility was abhorrent. It had been less than twenty-four hours since the entire shitshow with Garrus had gone down.

“This is the  _Normandy_   _SR-2_ responding,” she replied testily, snapping the elastic of her hairband against her wrist. She leveled her gaze into a middling distance at a whole lot of silver wall across the table and counted backwards from ten. Already the exchange was proving to her that as far as the Alliance was concerned, she and Cerberus were persona non grata. She understood why—it wouldn’t look good on paper to have the military mixing with human supremacist groups—but she’d **died** for them.

“Former,” the word felt thick and ungainly on her tongue. “Former Commander Jane Shepard speaking. ID number 5923-AC-2826, N7. Requesting permission to speak with Admiral Hackett regarding his communique.” Shepard was already dialing herself up to a twelve when she needed to be somewhere around a five to level with the old coot when the marine spoke again.

“Acknowledged, preparing the QEC hologram now,” he said.

The table in the center of the room lowered into a recess that opened up in the floor. A brief shimmer of baby blue materialized in front of her as the hologram platform slid out from underneath it. Soon the shimmer solidified into the tall, broad lines of one of her old commanding officers. Hackett hadn’t changed a bit these last two years, it seemed. Before she’d died Shepard and the other officers she was friendly with had viewed him as an unchanging, pristine hallmark of military excellence: someone to look up to, a model soldier they strived to emulate. Boiling alive in her own exo-suit had shot the idea to hell.

“Shepard.”

Hackett greeted her with a familiarity that made her chest tighten. Shepard didn’t hate him, but there was bad blood between her and the Alliance now, lingering in the dark spaces between the the Sol system and Omega’s underbelly. As far as Shepard knew Hackett was as by-the-book as it got when it came to loyalty. Systems Alliance or nothing, and fuck Cerberus. There were no allowances or compassionate leaves for still-walking corpses.

“Admiral,” she managed to eek out with a neutral, somewhat-flat tone. She hoped her expression matched. Already Shepard could feel the small frisons of anger coasting up her arms, setting her shoulders to lock and tremble. “Is this about Cerberus?”

“Not yet,” he said, shifting his weight from one leg to another as he folded his arms behind his back. The hologram flickered slightly. “But it will be. Before Alliance Command officially gets you on QEC I had a favor to ask. You’ve read my message?”

“I have.” The words were like badly-made porcelain: brittle, unfired and liable to shatter. Shepard kept her eyes trained on a ill-used silver spot of sheet metal along the wall.

“And?”

“While I’d be honored to help, there are certain objective parameters that I can’t fulfill at this time for obvious reasons. I’m engaged with other priorities.”

Hackett’s mouth twisted from a blasie slant to a downright frown. It wasn’t real frustration, but almost fatherly disappointment. Shepard had never known her father—he’d fucked off to gods knew where long before she was born—but she’d seen the look on Anderson enough times to know where it was coming from. Her hackles rose further.

“That’s a shame, Shepard. I sent that message in hopes that you’d be able to achieve where other scouting runs have failed. The Omega Nebula isn’t an area where we can just waltz in under an official capacity for a recovery mission: not with how the local criminal element operates. T’Loak’s organization has a stranglehold on the systems and she’d shoot us out of the sky in a heartbeat.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Shepard said. Her voice was a little less steady this time. Her knuckles were clenching so hard the bones were close to poking through her skin.

“She’s fond of you, and will be far more forgiving of your association with terrorists,” Hackett deadpanned. The room seemed to sway. “Unfortunately Alchera has been out of our reach these past few years and we’ve been unable to make any recovery of the remains for your former crew’s families. You’ll recall a similar situation on Akuze.”

It was like being hit by a two-ton vehicle as soon as the words came out of his mouth. Shepard felt the air go out of her in a sudden _woosh_ and the room swayed harder. She stumbled visibly, and through the QEC Hackett cocked his head, his brows folding as he squinted at the movement.

Shepard remembered the looks that her squad’s families had given her in the months preceding the incident. _Lone survivor_ **.** Only enough reflexes to save herself and the Alliance couldn’t mount any kind of rescue mission to retrieve the remains because it was far too dangerous. What was left of her forty-nine comrades had been digested in a thresher maw’s gut long before anyone mentioned a recovery effort.

_Your loved one is being shat out by a giant sand worm_ wasn’t something you put on a consolation letter or told a weeping parent who was bent double over a SA flag. Alliance brass didn’t tell that outright to the families of the deceased, but Hackett wasn’t going to hold her hand and ask nicely this time. He wanted a marginally happy ending and seemed determined to play the situation like a good hand of Skyllian Five.

“I can get the tags,” Shepard finally conceded after a long, contemplative silence between the two of them. “But I can’t put down the memorial you mentioned. I don’t have time to rendezvous and pick it up.”

Hackett looked like he’d been spending the silence observing her. Whatever he saw he seemed mildly displeased by it. Sadness didn’t translate well across QEC and Shepard tried to convince herself that disappointment was all he felt.

“That would suffice, Shepard,” he replied. His tone was tight. “The families would appreciate it.”

“Send me a list of the M.I.A so I can account for what I find down there,” she said. The ground was oscillating too hard beneath her. A lump of _something_ had lodged itself in her throat.

“Will do. Hackett out.” The Admiral shimmered away from the connection as the line was terminated.

Shepard immediately turned around and started savaging the wall behind her with her fists.

The metal groaned with a torturous _whhhgh_ , denting deep, Eezo crackling around her knuckles. Even Cerberus couldn’t buy plates that lasted long through her punches, and eventually the concave depressions were so numerous and her lungs were burning so badly that Shepard was forced to stop, spots of silver light flitting across her vision. She looked down to her clenched fingers, observing the gleaming bone of exposed knuckles. A moment later the flesh started knitting itself back together.

_Nothing_ , she thought rather clinically. _Nothing I do matters_. Shepard remembered the blackness on the other side: the awful, absolute emptiness. The nihilistic knowledge of there-is-nothing-after-death was systematically crushing, like the weight of deep space compressing the air from lungs. Immediately she tried to suppress the notion, but an idea had been planted.

Shepard left the communications room feeling angrier than when she’d walked into it. She wasn’t looking forward to fielding questions about why the QEC looked like a Vorcha had been brutally beaten head-first against it. When she exited the armory she got the impression that the level wasn’t entirely soundproof. Heads of the crew turned away rapidly after they spotted her, some springing apart like pyjaks to scurry off to their respective terminals.

_Well that’s just lovely._ If they hadn’t thought she was unstable before, they certainly assumed so now.

Kelly opened her mouth as soon as she got within earshot. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Shepard managed to crank out in a civil tone, holding up her hand in askance. Kelly wilted visibly and went back to typing. _Normandy’s_ resident shrink dealt with, Shepard queued up the call function on her omni-tool and redialed Joker, sidling up to the platform that jutted out over the galaxy map. She fumbled with the interface on the railing, zooming in on the Amada system. Alchera was a blueish-white marble suspended far from the local star.

“You’d better not be calling to hang up five seconds later. _Rude_ ,” Joker opined once the call had started.

“Hackett is requesting our assistance,” she said. Shepard was pleased that she managed to keep her voice steady, if a bit terse. “Recovery mission. He wants to see what we can find in the _Normandy’s_ crash site on Alchera.”

Jeff let out a low whistle after a long, pregnant pause. His tone was edged with bitterness. “Just when you think you’re out of the military for good, they drag you right back in.”

“How close are we to the Omega relay?”

“About a light year away considering how easy I’m going on the FTL engines. Far enough for you to tell me to bring her about.”

The Illusive Man had already sent them a message through Miranda—his favorite human carrier pigeon— after they’d gotten back from the clusterfuck of a mission on Omega. Their next destination was supposed to be a remote world in the Eagle Nebula where they needed to pick up a krogan doctorknown by most in the Terminus as _Warlord Okeer_. Shepard hadn’t been aware that the krogan even **had** medical personnel on file, and she didn’t want to find out what passed for their version of science _._

“Well, we’re in the neighborhood and all,” she reasoned blandly, flicking across the interface to pan out of the system she was viewing. _It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters._ She shut the thought out and tried to focus on the fact that Garrus was still alive several decks below. “I doubt we're going to recover any remains at this stage. The best we might find is some tags. Switch course.”

“Roger,” Joker replied. Beneath them the _Normandy_ rumbled as he punched in their new coordinates, the sleek vessel performing a high-G maneuver as it adjusted trajectory. The strain that was hidden in the pilot’s voice was nearly identical to hers.

* * *

 

 Shepard had tried strapping into her gear in the armory by herself, but Jacob had drifted over after giving up on disassembling a shotgun atop a nearby workbench.

“You sure you don’t need any support?” he said, his posture guarded as he folded his arms across his chest. Shepard bit back on the urge to tell him he was about to flex out of his bodysuit. At any other time the sound of the material groaning under the weight of biceps and pectoral muscles would have made her crack a smile, but not today.

“I’m good, Jacob,” she said, trying hard to translate Jacob to _squad_ in her mind so she would come off a little less robotic. “Really.”

A few thermal clips from her current gear went back into the munitions locker. It gave her something to look forward to: a goal, really. A motivation to go down, get the job done, then blitz back to the ship and to Garrus. She’d been away from him for a few hours by now so she had a reasonable excuse to go back. Even though Shepard knew he wouldn’t be up yet—he’d only **just** made it out of critical, his condition stabilized—she could still bring down something small to the medbay. Chakwas would hopefully let her set up a cleaning kit with a weapon that was as innocuous as a pistol so she could park her ass right beside him and talk to the turian about the last couple of days, surreptitiously mapping out the contours of his face in the process. No one would have to know the real reason for her visit.

“It’s a dead rock. Just metal and ice. I’ll be fine,” she reiterated when Jacob asked again. The marine gave her a short nod as if he understood where she was coming from, before returning to his workstation to break down the shotgun. He wasn’t too bad, all things considered: took longer to warm up to her than some of the others, and Jacob flew Cerberus colors, but he gave Shepard her space and was good on the battlefield.

Then Miranda walked in.

Shepard’s relationship with Miranda was contentious at best. It had less to do with the woman herself and more to do with whom she answered to, as Shepard was **not** a fan of false power struggles and falser theatrics. It was this particular play they had going on, when she got down to the heart of the matter—the facile little fantasy where they pretended that Shepard was the one in charge when everyone knew that she wasn’t. Cerberus wanted a well-trained doll to be the face of their glorious revolution, and today looked to be much of the same.

“Did we switch course?” Miranda demanded. Shepard made a _hnh_ of affirmation and didn’t look at her.

“Amada system,” she supplied without further prompting. “We’re going to Alchera.”

Faintly—so faint that Shepard wondered if she was imagining it—she heard Miranda draw in a sharp breath.

“The Illusive Man wants us in the Eagle Nebula,” she said in a cold, perfunctory manner. Beyond the fragility of their working relationship, Shepard liked that about her—the way the woman was all business when it came down to wire, and how she wasn’t afraid of pulling punches. In another life they might have been friends. Unfortunately Cerberus was Cerberus and Shepard was Shepard, and she was on her second attempt at an already violence-prone life where fate had a habit of putting her through the wringer. They sure as shit weren’t going to be painting each others’ nails or gabbing over drinks anytime soon. Not with how things had panned out so far.

Shepard shrugged in a lethargic fashion in response to the accusation, her mind nearly running on empty as she walked over to the lockers and began to strip out of her clothes to pull on her wetsuit. Her body felt strung out as she shucked off her on-duty uniform, the grey fabric of the wetsuit making a zipping sound as it slid over her slender legs. She noticed a slight, involuntary tremor travelling up the length of one tendon in her thigh. Shepard pointedly tried to ignore it.

_It’s nothing. You’ll get better soon. Chakwas says so._

“Shepard –”

“Timmy can wait,” Shepard said, wiggling her hips back and forth as she pulled the skin-tight suit past them, then up around her waist, which went easier. Her middle was smaller than she remembered it, and she knew this because all of her clothes felt too loose around her waist. Not enough food and too many stims, probably.

Miranda frowned slightly, her perfect lips tilting down into a moue of displeasure as she carefully balanced her weight on one leg. Even angry Miranda was immaculate, and in a vague sort of way Shepard wondered what it would have been like to be as pretty as the other woman; a real doll, straight from birth. The **right** kind of doll, instead of the mangled puppet strings that she’d been constructed from.

_Nothing_ , she reminded herself. _That’s not your life and never will be. Stop obsessing over useless fantasies._ She turned away, going back to shrugging the wetsuit over her shoulders. They felt a bit narrower, too.

“Timmy?” Miranda asked, verbally unamused.

“‘The Illusive Man,’” Shepard explained, making air quotes with her fingers before zipping up the front of her wetsuit. A few strands of red hair got caught under the throat of the suit, tugging free after she fretted a hand over the back of her neck. The thermal weave went on next. “Tim for short. _Timmy_. Get it?”

Jacob let out a loud, gut wrenching laugh before catching a glare from Miranda. He quietly went back to his gun.

Miranda sighed loudly. Her voice was less forgiving this time, but there was something else there; a hint of worry, perhaps. “Shepard, we should go to the Eagle—”

“Okeer’s a krogan,” Shepard cut in, sliding on her greaves. She buckled them around her thighs with a _clack_ and tried to ignore the way her hands were trembling. “They survive for hundreds of years—a warlord who also happens to be a doctor will survive for a few days more.”

“I don’t think it’s wise that you go down to Alchera in your current—”

Something snapped, like the sound of her band. Her armor? Maybe. Shepard was already slapping the thing on in a blind rage, and a little extra force made barely a difference. There was a dull roaring in her ears, her chest compressing. In between thoughts of boiling alive in a hardsuit _just like this one,_ all she could think about was Garrus. Being away from him was making her physically ill.

“If it makes you feel better I’ll bring along my sidearm,” she bit out, marvelling that she could still keep her voice steady. “You know, to shoot at the non-existent threat that you all think I’m going to encounter? Maybe a sentient race of molemen or zombies from the SR-1?”

As soon as the words left her mouth, the end of her sentence fell flat and died stillborn on the floor. _Well fuck._ Around her the silence was so severe that the drop of a pin could be heard. Shepard nearly bit through her lip in her effort to conceal her expression.

The glow of the cybernetics reaching through the cracks in her face were bright enough to give her pistol and pitch black armor an unsettling sheen of crimson when she turned her head towards them. She didn’t even want to know what she looked like at this point. Would it be too much to request they take out the mirror in her bathroom? It was an idle thought, but not entirely outlandish.

“You know what, never mind,” she said. “I’ll discuss this later. When I’m back.” She quickly gathered up her gear and all but booked it from the armory, keeping her head down as she walked. “Comm me if there’s any change with him.”

She didn’t care about anything else.

* * *

 

 Shepard ended up killing two pjykas with one frag grenade by bundling up her remaining gear and throwing it into the Kodiak. The VI in the dropship was advanced enough to program an entry vector, and once it was airborne and EDI was giving her the go-ahead Shepard began snapping on the rest of her kit. Every minute or so she would pause to obsessively check and recheck her air intake on her helmet, along with the other containment seals on her hardsuit.

She was still boiling from earlier. She’d entertained the thought of broadcasting the short, succinct message she’d composed on her way to the bay, “ _Attention Normandy: I do not need someone to hold my fucking hand. Shepard out,_ ” but had refrained.

Already she was regretting descending to Alchera unmedicated. The ones Chakwas had forced down her throat in an effort to stop her from hyperventilating over Garrus were wearing off. There was a med-kit beckoning her from the opposite bulkhead, but all it had in the way of injectables were medi-gel and basic stims. Shepard didn’t consider them, because the last thing she needed was a barbiturate charging through her veins while she relived her own death. That definitely was an idea that would end up in her book of stupid ideas, which was already a lengthy read. _Alchera Part Two_ was going to be the climax.

When she went into the cockpit to watch the descent, the icy planet hung below the Kodiak, pearlescent and stark against the black void of space. She let her head fall back against the cool steel of the bulkhead, letting some of the cold leech away the headache that was building right below the surface of her forehead. _One, two_ , she reminded herself, breathing deep as she tried to calm herself down. _You can do this._

Then came the hard part. She shut her eyes tight and jammed her helmet over her head, connecting the support systems from her hardsuit into the ports at the base of her neck before she could second-guess the motion. A puff of air grazed her cheeks and the bright, incandescent light of her HUD filtered through the thin membrane of her eyelids.

_See? Not so bad_ , she repeated.

An audible sob was the only answer she gave herself, muffled beneath the thickness of her helmet. Shepard wrapped her trembling arms around her too-thin middle and curled in on herself, wounded.

When the Kodiak arrived she clumsily keyed open the door after the decompression cycle, dropping out of the ship without a word to the VI piloting it. The Kodiak stayed where it was for a moment, hovering in low atmo, before it took off to rendezvous with the SR-2, the autopilot completing the pre-programed motion. Shepard had to walk for a bit before she found the _Normandy_ , and the entire time she did the tread of her steps sounded like a death march in her ears.

The terrain was rocky. Parts of the SR-1 were scattered about it like the dismembered bits of a giant, ungainly body. Pale blue snow—light and fluffy—barely crunched beneath her booted feet. The zero atmosphere sky of Alchera was thick with stars overhead, luminescent white splattered against the darkest of ink. Shepard swallowed loudly inside her helmet, wetting her lips as her visor fogged up in front of her. The soft _beep_ of her life support system was loud in her hears, her breathing too harsh and quick. She was going to burn through her air tanks in less than an hour this way, and she had to clench her hands against her armoured thighs to stop herself from wildly reaching for her hair hose.

Blackness, followed spots of color. Someone was saying her name. Miranda was speaking through the mic.

“Shepard, are you alright?”

“What did I say about the handholding?!” she snapped, but it came out like an angry whimper. She was so _mad_.

“Breathe slower,” Miranda offered. She cut off the mic on her own volition.

Shepard felt for the elastic of her rubber band across her wrist, buried three layers deep beneath the hardsuit, thermal mesh and wetsuit. Layers upon layers that kept her from snapping the elastic, and she was clawing at her armored wrist instead. Her steps stumbled through the thick, fine dusting of snow. In an effort to keep herself standing she had to visualize it instead, feeling the comforting _thwak_ of the rubber band against the tender stretch of veins beneath pale, translucent flesh.

There were no more bodies, but the guts of the SR-1 were still scattered around her and scorched by laser beams. She needed to scream. She was imagining Alchera from a different position, the Big Blue below instead of the Big Black above. Shepard remembered the way her suit had slowly heated up like the sides of a metal pot over a red hot stove; how she’d been unable to escape it. She remembered wheezing, flashes of multi-colored light that went back and forth like a Prothean beacon across the back of her eyelids. Black patches were brought on by lack of oxygen, her eyeballs feeling like they were going to burst. So much heat, and the horror just kept going in an endless metronome of agony. She was trapped in it’s cycle.

Shepard had sobbed for her mother in the final moments, but her mother had died weak and shivering on the floor when she was two. She was always so alone.

This had been a bad idea. She was definitely going to scream. **Get the tags and leave.**

“Jeff, I’m going to turn off the comms for awhile,” she managed to choke out. She could tell Joker didn’t approve, but he didn’t stop her.

“Kiss the old girl for me,” he said, his own voice cracking a bit, and Shepard stymied a sob inside her helmet, wrapping her arms more tightly around her armoured middle. _Don’t reach for the air hose. Don’t be stupid._

“Mhmm,” she mumbled, and then she heard Jeff cut the comm. All went silent, even the background chatter of her HUD and life support systems.

Shepard stumbled for a bit more, moving amongst the ruins. The _Normandy_ had snapped in half partially above Alchera’s low atmosphere, sliced through with a collector’s beam before disintegrated on reentry. It had landed on an relatively flat plateau and it was a miracle that even half the ship had ended up in the same place instead of being scattered to the four corners of the god-forsaken planet. The ice groaned beneath her feet as the plates shifted against one another; deep _kocks_ and _booms_ that sometimes took on the eerie, metallic cadence of rachni. Alchera was nothing and everything like Noveria, where the winds constantly whistled and the frigid cold was a living, furious leviathan, the snow hard and crusted.

Alchera was soft and sad and devoid of wind, the snow barely having enough shape to hold anything. Shepard continued forward, keeping an eye out for anything of interest.

Eventually she saw a spot of something shiny on the ground, almost silver. Shepard leaned down, shoving aside snow that sifted like flour to reveal the object. It was a tag: _Silas Crosby, ID number 3248-3B_. Shepard’s throat closed up further, her free handing clenching around her middle in a death grip as she forced herself to keep standing. She almost needed someone to hold her up.

_This isn’t Akuze_ , Shepard told herself, picking the tag off the ground by its long chain and wrapping it twice around her thin wrist to keep it from falling. _You died on this moon too_.

It was was worse.

She kept walking. She found more tags.

They were silverfish scurrying beneath the seat of a toilet bowl, and every time Shepard saw one she felt her heart skip a beat at the sight of the non-movement. Her wrist grew heavier with each passing ID. Five, then six. Eight, then ten. Draven, Barrett, Waaberi. **Pressly**. Half of these people she’d talked to on more than one occasion, but she hadn’t thought about since waking up on the slab. Her thoughts had been consumed with another: with memories of her own skin sloughing off her face. Shepard tried not to dry heave in her helmet. She still gagged.

**_Breath_** _, Shep_ , he’d told her. _I’m here._

She missed him so much.

As Shepard got closer to the broken hull of the _Normandy_ , the tags became more frequent. Still no bodies, but she reasoned they’d burned up in atmo like hers. She’d survived out of sheer bad luck and the universe holding a grudge. The curving ribs of the SR-1 were right in front of her now, chrome colored and rising upwards like the bow of the moon. The thick blue stripe of her underbelly cut across the _Normandy_ ’s bones next to her name, her broken wing far too turian shaped for Shepard’s current liking.

She’d just been a baby when Shanxi had happened; still stuck on the streets crawling through air ducts to hide from the bigger kids. Walking had been difficult, because she’d always been so hungry. Shepard had never thought about space back then. She didn’t really remember thinking about **anything** , other than a gnawing ache in her belly and a sense of exhaustion.

The headaches had been a constant; she had a vague, unformed memory of curling up beneath a cardboard box, one arm tucked beneath her bony chest as blue Eezo raced across tiny, grubby fingers on her other hand. When Chavek had found her she’d flopped over like a wet rag and hadn’t moved for days, she’d been so sick. Not enough food when she was little and that’s why she was so small, the crime boss liked to tease her. If the Reds had found her sooner she would’ve been much taller.

Her first official health check once she’d joined the Alliance had proven as much. Shepard had told Garrus about it one time after a night of trying to drink herself under the table. Not all of it, of course, and nothing fancy, but even across species his look had translated to one of horror.

“I’m fine,” she’d slurred from her prone position on the couch, warm and satiated as she’d curled on her side. Her left hand had dangled over the rim of the seat. “See?” But he hadn’t.

A large hand had flexed around the sniper rifle he was cleaning, talons scraping audibly against the ash-colored metal. Mandibles had fluttered with distress: there’d been a low, keening sound at the back of his throat as he’d stared at her a bit too hard. Garrus didn’t talk about them much, but Shepard knew he came from a high-ranking family on Palaven. Aria had needled him about it more than once.

She immediately felt bad for telling him. Nauseous, almost, and sick to her stomach. She didn’t like it when Garrus looked at her like that.

“It’s not your fault,” she’d said, words made woozy by alcohol.

“I’m sorry,” he’d replied. Turian vocals did some terrible to her insides when they were really sad. The reverberating echo got more ragged, the lower pitch slowing down while the higher one fluctuated faster. Shepard always felt like crying when she heard it: a Pavlovian response, and perhaps it was because she associated it with him.

“Idiot. You’re younger than me.” Garrus hadn’t even been born yet when she’d been dying for the very first time; a pile of dirty clothes and pitiful little breaths down a dimly lit corridor.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and that awful echo got worse. _I would have been there_.

The entire conversation had begun to make her uncomfortable, even through the haze of alcohol. “Well you’re here now, on the _Normandy_ ,” she’d said. “That’s what matters, right?”

There was no denying it now; no pretending this was the wreck of a different ship. It had been a terrible idea to come back to Alchera. Her heart in her throat, free hand still wrapped around her middle, Shepard stumbled forward and put her hand to the outside of the ruins. A shudder rushed through her. A gasp left her lips, followed by a reverberating moan inside the padded confines of her helmet as she tried to tamp back on a scream. She pressed her forehead against the side of the _Normandy_ —glass thunking against chrome—and tried not to die.

Blindly fumbling with the exterior latch on the side of her helmet, she hit a switch. The comm flared to life again, soft and beeping. EDI answered her.

“Are you ready to return, Shepard?”

“Can I speak to Joker?” she asked, clearing her throat to purge it of the screams. Her eyes were closed and watering. The tags _clacked_ around her wrist as she put her hand to the ship, stroking its side.

“Of course, Shepard.”

A moment later, Jeff was back. “What’s up, commander?”

“What did she look like, burning up?” Shepard asked, sniffling loudly. It sounded **too** loud in her helmet, and she was sure Jeff could hear her, but it might have been the way that everything else was muffled, too.

Joker knew what she was talking about. Everyone did.

“Sad,” he replied. Shepard screwed her lips shut, then her eyes, nodding hard inside her helmet. Her eyes were definitely watering now. She tried to wipe them and met glass. _Just breathe, Shep_ , but there was no air on Alchera.

“Anything else, commander?” Joker asked. Hs voice was soft and non-judgemental.

“I think I’m done,” Shepard said. Jeff didn’t ask why.

“Find all of them?” he asked.

“Almost,” Shepard said, taking a step back from the _Normandy_. She trailed her hand along it. “Did the Kodiak make it back to base?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Send her down with a pilot this time. Make sure they hurry.”

“Right, commander.” He cut out.

Shepard did a few more turns, looking through the snow. Another glint of silver metal caught her eye, then; a tag far apart from the others in the middle of the clearing. There was something in the snow next to it that was black and charred.

Feeling queasy for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Shepard stalked towards it. Her life support systems beeped a heavy rhythm in her ear. The silver was a tag, she knew, but she tried not to focus on the black thing because it looked far too familiar. Shepard kept her eyes trained on the ground until she had no other choice. Out of the corner of her peripheral vision she saw it was a helmet with a busted air hose in the back. The entire thing was fried to a crisp, but she still could see the remains of what looked like N7 logo along its side.

_It’s not what you think it is,_ Shepard immediately told herself, but it did little good. She swallowed too heavily; the tags of her dead team members bounced against the hard plates armoring her stomach and across the greaves on her thighs. Bending down quickly, Shepard swiped the last remaining tag off the ground. Turning it over, she read the name under Alchera’s dim lighting.

_Jane Shepard, Service No. 5923-AC-2826_.

Rasping. There was a rasping sound, loud and wet. Her own gasps inside her helmet, fast and shallow. The cloying snow shuffled beneath her black booted feet as the ground swayed beneath her, like _Normandy_ breaking up in atmo.

The ship’s lights had been flashing red, but Alchera was blue. No ground beneath her feet. Was that her helmet? Shepard looked back to the black thing on the ground and saw a body there, broken plates and bits of burnt skin exposed beneath. There were bones in the shattered opening of her helmet, the slant of her nose tapering into a hole nothingness. Empty eye sockets were sightless and staring, a lock of red hair tangling with Alchera’s ice crystals as it dangled out of the smashed visor.

“Oh god,” Shepard choked. She was burning up and there was no air. Her hand scrabbled at the back of her helmet as she heard the hiss of a hose disconnecting, tags clattering around her wrists as she attempted to reach it. Jets thrummed, muffled by the frantic pulse of her own shallow breathing. Waiting in space for what seemed like ages and no one had picked her up. No one had come back for her. She’d drifted, blue beneath her, then orange and red, finally followed by blackness as her eyes popped.

Face melting, screaming inside the boiling container. _Everything hurt._ Images flashing like a Prothean beacon across her retinas until she couldn’t see at all. They’d left her, the others. She couldn’t breathe and they’d brought her back to do it again. Shepard, _Shepard_ , **Shep –**

“Shepard?” someone was saying over the comm as she stumbled back from the helmet. She fell and hit the ground in a cascade of white, a sob escaping her lips as she tried to right herself amongst the shapeless soft detritus. Blue beneath her, black above. They’d used her up and tossed out her corpse, letting her burnout in atmosphere. Why had they done that, why did they leave her, why would they tell her she was nothing, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, her hands were on the hose **–**

“Shepard,” someone was saying. “Shepard? Shep? Commander, is something wrong?” More beeping over the radio. More bones beneath her. So many bones, her owns and those on the SR-1 and Akuze and everyone else she wouldn't be able to save from the reapers. Oceans of them, whole galaxies and she’d been brought back to watch them die. How could they be so cruel?

A feminine voice was speaking to someone, soft and monotone: a machine, perhaps. An AI? Then, “How far away is the drop team?”

“Two minutes.”

“Make them go _faster,_ damnit. Shep? Hey Shep, can you hear me? Everything alright, cap?”

“M-my air hose,” she gasped. She was tugging on it, the inside of her helmet beeping furiously. The seal was whining against the back of her head, her head torquing to the side with the movement. “It d-disconnected.”

“Oh fuck,” Joker said. Someone swore on the comm next to him, sounding like they were standing a bit farther away. The pitch was similar to Miranda’s.

Shepard’s breath started to build up on the thin pane of material separating her from the negative temperature outside her exosuit. She imagined the little dots crystallizing this time, to be flash-frozen instead of boiled. There was a rumbling sound in the air: a teeth-chattering tremor that shook the ground beneath her, ice particles dancing along the top of the snow drifts. Vaguely Shepard wondered if she was unlucky enough that the gods—no longer content with destroying her ship—would break up the planet she was standing on as well.

_Am I crying?_ Two years and four billion credits later, Shepard was dying again, barely a week after they’d brought her back relatively whole. Into the bonepile, then. She crumpled, her knees sending up soft, pillowy puffs of white as her hands tangled further with the hose, holding onto the broken seal out of bitterness. The rumbling was getting louder, now, and there was a patch of darkness hovering overhead. It hid the stars as it traversed across the horizon, and those hazy, far-off stars winked down at her as they re-emerged over the rim of it. _Welcome back_ , they seemed to say.

There was a heavy _thud_ as the dark object landed on the ground.

“Shep, just hang on,” someone was saying. It sounded like Joker. There was the _hiss_ of a door opening, but there was no doors this deep in space. No _Normandy_ , either. The muffled _thunk_ of boots, but Shepard wondered if it was the booming of her own heart instead. “Don’t panic on me now.”

“I hate it,” she rasped. The seal on her air-hose twisted. Someone was shouting the word “Commander,” dark figures rushing towards her amongst the blue and white. She hated them for bringing her back. “Tell them I hate it–”

“COMMANDER!” someone said. Then there were hands on her, prying her fingers off the air hose. There were hands slapping hers away, bringing her back to the present.

A second person crouched in front of her, shouting at her through their headset. Their words were muffled and she didn’t respond. When Shepard didn’t, they reached out and tapped the side of her helmet, rapping their knuckles against the armored plating to see if she was okay. Sucking in a desperate, reedy gasp and finding air, Shepard nodded. Behind the Cerberus private was the blockish shape of the Kodiak, it’s landing struts extended into the snow.

_Kodiak_. Not even the _Normandy_ , but the  _Normandy SR-2_. The ship hadn’t blown up, and she’d landed on Alchera on her own volition. She was safe.

“Commander, are you alright?” asked the Cerberus soldier. Shepard took a second deep breath, and then a third, her hands twitching awkwardly as the other soldier inspected her suit. She could **breathe** again, and she wasn’t dying. Before she could respond, the private behind her did.

“She was pulling on the air hose,” he said. The soldier crouched in front of her snapped his fingers several times in front of Shepard’s face to her her attention. She turned to him, startling slightly, and when she did he activated his omni-tool and ran the interface along her body to check her vitals.

“Are you alright, Commander?” he repeated. Shepard sunk into her own body, her senses returning. She felt the air return, heady and thick, and when she looked to the helmet on the ground there was no body. She was going to be sick.

“I’m fine,” she choked out. “I’m good.”

Off to the side, the Kodiak continued to _hum_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author’s Note**
> 
> And Chapter V of _Meridian Word_ is up! Thanks to everyone who reviewed, kudo’d, and followed. Just an FYI for the readers—both our schedules are a bit hectic these upcoming two weeks, so we might be a few days late with the next update. If you don’t see Chapter VI two Fridays from now, don’t panic.
> 
> **Intel**
> 
>   * The [**UT-47 Kodiak Drop Shuttle**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/UT-47_Kodiak_Drop_Shuttle) is the workhorse of the SR-2 _Normandy_. Among the Systems Alliance soldiers, the model has earned the nickname “Combat Cockroach” for its durability and design. Designed to transport a small amount of crew from ship to surface, it is capable of limited FTL travel and excels in planetary flight. 600 years after the events of _Mass Effect 3_ , the Kodiak is getting quite the workout in the Heleus Cluster of the Andromeda galaxy, shipped along with all the other essentials that are paramount to a successful space-faring culture.
>   * An MRE is a common military anagram for slop in a bag, a “meal ready to eat”. Just add water and suffer.
>   * [**Admiral Steven Hackett**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Steven_Hackett), born in Buenos Aires in 2134, is top brass in the Systems Alliance navy. As a young enlisted, he spearheaded efforts to colonize space beyond the Sol Relay. He was commissioned as a second-lieutenant the year before the First Contact War, marking a rarely seen assent from enlisted to officer. He went on to become a legendary figure in the Alliance military.
>   * The flag of the [**Systems Alliance**](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Systems_Alliance) is typically given to the family members of deceased servicemen and women of its military. Only 3% of humans volunteer for the service, making the Citadel Council perceive it as a “sleeping giant”; what they lack in numbers they make up for in superior technology and an emphasis on “mobility and individual initiative”. These traits are clearly best seen in their N7 graduates.
> 



End file.
